Us Against the World
by TrenchcoatsAreSexy
Summary: Wilson is kidnapped by someone with a grudge against House... and Amber refuses to stand by... But time is running out.
1. Chapter 1

Us Against the World

**Disclaimer/Author Note: I do not own any characters from House; David Shore does, I believe. **

**AU explanation: Consider for the purposes of this fic that the events of "House's Head"/"Wilson's Heart" never happened, and that Wilson and Amber have stayed together through Seasons 5 & 6. As this fic begins, House has only recently gotten into a relationship with Cuddy, and only even more recently made it public. (So this would be VERY early in Season 7). Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. **

**Another note: All of these chapter titles are song titles, as is the title of this fic (though in the fic title case the song, "Us Against the World" by Play, has nothing much to do with either the tone or the action of the fic). If anyone is sufficiently interested, there will be a note at the end of each chapter of what song it is… **

**Feedback is appreciated, as well as gushing about how awesome my music taste is. Flames are welcomed, as they are far more interesting than nothing at all!**

Chapter One: A Shot in the Dark

"_But a shot in the dark  
>One step away from you…"<em>

Dr. James Wilson was happy to finally be home. It had been a long and frankly incredibly depressing night, and he'd been confronted with two cases of pancreatic cancer and three of lung cancer, all terminal and all rapidly progressing. It wasn't as if losing a patient was a rare thing in his profession, but that didn't mean that it made it any easier or that it didn't stop him from constantly wondering if there was something more that he could have done to help them. But at least he could curl up in his bed and watch some TV and then, when his girlfriend Amber returned home from work, they could make late dinner together and he could try and forget, for at least a little while.

As he reached over to pop the lock of his car, he thought about the strange events that had occurred over the last few weeks. Against all odds, somehow, his friend and boss Lisa Cuddy had decided to initiate a relationship with his best friend and colleague, Greg House. The words seemed utterly bizarre to Wilson, and he wasn't entirely sure that he could believe them, even after House and Cuddy had both told him that it really was the case and not a late and rather cruel April Fools joke being played upon him.

Not that he was jealous of Cuddy, of course. He reminded himself of that, because the feeling that had been flowing through him would have convinced him otherwise. He was desperately happy with Amber, after all; they had been together for almost three years now, and Wilson had finally allowed himself to consider the idea of proposing to her and ending up in a fourth marriage – one that could potentially, actually work.

So why was he still turning over the question of House being with Cuddy in his head? Wasn't that the best thing for him if he did decide to propose to Amber, after all? House would be happy with Cuddy, and he wouldn't have to worry about attempts to destroy his relationship, just the usual House attempts to embarrass him which both he and Amber had chalked up to inevitable by now.

He began to consider what exactly would go down if he invited House and Cuddy out on a double-date.

He then realized that he hadn't opened the door to his car, despite having been staring at it for the last ten minutes. He popped the locked and pressed the door open, kicking one leg out and stepping into the wet grass and hoping that his tie wasn't about to get soaked from the drizzle that was beginning to spit noisily at his apartment.

He slammed the door shut as he wondered why he hadn't gotten a chance to flick on the TV and find out that there was supposed to be rain today. He hoped that the leak in the bathroom ceiling, the one he'd promised Amber he'd call the landlord about having fixed, hadn't resulted in a huge puddle of nasty water on the tile floor yet again. She was, after all, still giving him a bit of a hard time about the last time. Admittedly, though, it hadn't been his fault that she'd decided that the bathroom sink was a good place to dry out her week-long attempt at watercolors, but Wilson still felt guilty about letting a stylized and psychedelic rendering of a liver get ruined.

He gave only a few second's thought to the unfamiliar car parked off to the right of his apartment, because his thoughts were drifting, pinballing back and forth between the two most important people in his life – Amber and House, House and Amber. He'd been so critical of House's jealousy when he and Amber had gotten together, and he was kicking himself for feeling it now that House was with Cuddy. Did he feel left out? Was that it? Or was it a case of feeling fifteen again, that irritating notion that one's best friend now has a girlfriend and doesn't want to hang out with you anymore?

Either way, Wilson refused to have it. That wasn't him. He wasn't that immature, and he was going to be happy for House. Cuddy would be good for him. Maybe he would change for the better, like Wilson had always tried to get him to. And what did Wilson _care_, anyway?

He took another step towards the apartments, smiling as he remembered that not so long ago he was calling a lonely, if luxurious, hotel room home, and the only guest he was entertaining was a certain Detective Tritter. Now, he was in a happy relationship with a woman he loved, living in a cozy apartment, and his best friend had not only kicked the addiction that had nearly gotten them both thrown in jail, but he was also in a relationship, a potentially happy one. Then why was his mind still reeling with thoughts of what could all go wrong? Was he afraid Cuddy would hurt House? After all, that had been his concern with Cameron. Then again, that was Cameron, who gushed after House because he was something broken, something she could try and fix. A project. Cuddy seemed to like House for House – maybe just as Wilson did.

Wilson took a few more steps forward as he held his left hand in front of his face, staring at the place where his wedding band had been, three times now. It seemed a bit ludicrous to get married four times, but he was indeed considering it. Didn't that type of thing seem to be more up the alley of celebrities, models, movie stars, or rock stars – not oncologists? But if it was right this time – and it felt right…

But hadn't it felt right with Sam? Well, not quite.

With Bonnie? Perhaps…

With Julie? There he was just fooling himself.

He allowed himself to mull over how the name Amber Wilson sounded. Amber Volakis-Wilson, maybe?

Was she even really that interested in getting married? Maybe just this, what they had, worked for both of them.

That was the thought that was stuck in Wilson's head, on replay, like a record that had played too many times and now the needle was stuck, when Wilson felt a pinch on his neck. He didn't quite register it at first, until he realized that something hurt. Then, that something wasn't right.

"Hello, Dr. Wilson." There was a voice in his ear. The voice hurt, or maybe his neck did. And then he closed his eyes and saw blue, red, green, bright flashing orbs and then the quiet lull of nothing.

* "A Shot in the Dark" – Ozzy Osbourne, The Ultimate Sin, 1986.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Rampant guessing as to the identity of the kidnapper is encouraged. :P**

Chapter Two: Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

"_Phantom faces at the window  
>Phantom shadows on the floor<br>Empty chairs at empty tables  
>Where my friends will meet no more…" <em>

The first thing that Amber noticed as she opened the door to Wilson and her apartment was that Wilson's keys were missing. Normally, they hung on the other side of the lock, and every time Amber jostled the door they would fall on the floor, and she'd curse and tell Wilson to please put them somewhere else next time.

This time she opened the door and didn't hear the jingling, didn't see the keys fall. She raised an eyebrow and stepped inside, wondering if her boyfriend may have finally heeded her requests.

"James?" she called, walking towards their bedroom. Maybe he'd left his keys in his pocket, she decided as she slipped hers in her own pocket. The creeping sense that something wasn't quite right that was rising in her heart – that meant nothing, surely, and would dissipate immediately upon seeing Wilson in the other room, right? "James? Where are you?"

There was no answer.

_Well, he's not here_, Amber considered, _Maybe he ran to the store to get some groceries… _She smiled at how he would come back with her favorite foods sometimes to surprise her, and she'd walk into the kitchen hearing the rustling of plastic bags and smell a sweet scent from the stovetop. That must be it… _It's late for that isn't it, though? _

That was when she turned and noticed Wilson's car in the driveway.

_Well, he's definitely not at the store, then. But where would he go without his car? _

There was only one logical answer, and she thought it with an irritated groan. House's. House's made sense; he must have come down and picked up Wilson in his own car, and the two were off having "guy time", and Wilson had forgot to call Amber and let her know – either that, or House had cajoled him into not calling. _Unless I just missed the call. _

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone, turning it on and looking to see if she had any missed calls. _None._ She would just have to call him and try and convince him to let House babysit himself. _Considering that House is dating Cuddy now, I've have thought that he may have been a little less clingy on Wilson, but apparently that idea's a fiction, _Amber thought angrily. _I can't even have a nice dinner alone with my boyfriend without House snatching him away. Why do I feel like I'm constantly in the middle of a bizarre threesome?_

She pressed the call button over "James" and placed it to her ear, her lips pursing as she heard it go to voicemail. That wasn't like him, he normally always kept his phone charged… _Maybe his phone got wet or it just broke?_ She groaned and scrolled up a few entries to dial House's number. It went to voicemail as well, but it rang out, first.

She would just have to drive over House's place and go get him. Hopefully Wilson wouldn't find it too embarrassing, but her concern for her boyfriend's reputation in front of House was beginning to be less important than assuaging the panic she was beginning to feel. _But that's irrational. He's fine. Why are you getting so worked up?_

Amber had never been one for instinct; she didn't like things that couldn't be easily explained. But there was something not right, she was sure of it. For once in her life, though, she would rather be wrong.

House was awakened from the peaceful slumber he'd been having on his couch by a very loud banging on the door. He grimaced, hoping the police hadn't come to bust him for one of his old hooker rendezvous, or something like that. Well, there was only one way to find out.

He painfully pulled himself into a sitting position, realizing his back had gone terribly sore during his nap, and then groped around for his cane, finally locating it leant against the arm of the couch. All the while, the pounding didn't cease, and he his motivation to the door began to be just to slug whoever was on the other side. He limped over to the entrance and yanked on the door knob, to find Amber Volakis nearly tumbling into his living room.

"Hi!" she exclaimed in a not-particularly-friendly voice. "Where's Wilson?" House's brow furrowed in confusion.

"Wilson?" he asked, his eyes still half-lidded from sleep. On the TV, Nate was sleeping with the daughter of an executed murderer on _Six Feet Under_. House had fallen asleep during one of the previous episodes, as he had grown tired of waiting to see half-naked action from Nate's ex-fiancée, Brenda.

"Yeah. You know – my boyfriend. Where is he? I need to bring him home. It's past his bedtime," Amber replied sarcastically, crossing her arms.

"He's not here," House replied. "I figured he was with you." He looked at her, confusion beginning to turn into worry. Unless Wilson was at work – and even, sometimes, if he was, he was usually or always with or within reach of either House or Amber. "When's the last time you saw him?"

"Before I left for work this morning," she replied, starting to grow frantic. "I was going to get home later than him and normally when that happens, he'll get home and wait for me. But when I got home, he wasn't there, even though his car is parked in the lot… And I figured the only place he could have gone without his car would be with you…" Amber locked eyes with House. "Where could he be? Goddamnit, House, if you know, you need to tell me. If he's cheating or something, I would rather know and be pissed than have a heart attack worrying." House shook his head.

"I have no idea where he could be… I'm trying to think," he let out a sigh. "We should either both stay here or both go back to his apartment, and try to figure out where he could be. There has to be a logical explanation."

_Yeah,_ Amber thought to herself, _but none of those logical explanations are looking very good right now. _

* "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" – _Les Misérables_, 1986.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Photograph

"_Every time I see your face  
>It reminds me of the places we used to go<br>But all I've got is a photograph  
>And I realize you're not coming back anymore…"<em>

Wilson's head was on fire when he awoke. That was the first thing that he noticed. He could feel tears welling up in his eyes at the pounding pain behind his ears, in his skull, everywhere.

Wilson realized he couldn't see. He couldn't figure out where he could possibly be where he couldn't see, but he knew where he really should have been. He should be home – shouldn't he? He should reach across the bed and feel Amber there, lying next to him. Maybe he could wake her up and she could keep him company while he waited for the fire in his head to be extinguished.

He tried to reach across the bed, but he couldn't move his arms. They were bound with something – well, this wasn't right, someone had turned out the lights and he couldn't move. He tried desperately to figure it out, and he wondered if the reason he couldn't see was because all the lights were off. Maybe there was a power outage or maybe he had somehow forgotten to pay the electric bill. Maybe a storm had knocked everything out again. That made sense.

He opened his mouth and called out, "Amber?" But there was no reply. And then there was the sound of footsteps behind him, somewhere behind him. But they clinked, they must have been hard boots, maybe combat boots, and Amber certainly didn't wear those and where was she, anyway, what was this?

"So, you're awake," said a voice behind him. A voice that was certainly not Amber's. A voice that was, however, familiar. But in his jostled state, Wilson couldn't place it. He only knew that it belonged to someone who had no reason to be in his apartment.

"Leave me alone." Wilson meant to make the voice threatening, commanding, but it came out a pathetic whine. "Why are you doing this?" He didn't even know exactly what was being done to him, but he was quickly realizing it wasn't good. The bindings on his hands… He couldn't move his feet, either, and he slowly realized he was sitting upright, his arms behind him and tied to a … pipe maybe? He couldn't figure it out and he still couldn't see.

"That's not an option, Dr. Wilson," came the reply. Why couldn't he place that damn voice? "House made that not be an option."

Wilson recognized, with a sickening thud, the sound of a Polaroid camera going off.

* * *

><p>"What should we do?" Amber asked. "I mean, should we report him missing?" House shook his head sadly.<p>

"We can't report him missing until he's been gone 24 hours," he replied. "In the meantime, we have to try and figure out what must have happened, and see if we can figure anything out. It could be nothing." He snapped his fingers. "Why don't we try calling the hospital? Maybe Cuddy or somebody needed him at the last minute and picked him up – for some reason?" Amber tried to hide her scowl at the thought of Lisa Cuddy driving her boyfriend anywhere, but she nodded.

"Maybe it was an emergency," she whispered. "And he didn't have time to let us know." She was beginning to get terrified now, wondering if Wilson was lying in a ditch somewhere, or had fallen somehow and was bleeding out while they waited around and tried to figure out where he was.

House made his way back over to the couch, pulling up one of the cushions and extracting his cell phone. He picked it up and dismissed a voicemail from Amber before dialing the hospital's number. A few moments of questions later, he hung up and tried Cuddy instead. Nobody had seen Wilson.

House moved over and shut off the TV, deciding that _Six Feet Under_ was not really what he wanted to see right now.

As he did, he heard a thump on his front step. Amber and he exchanged glances, and Amber turned and ran to open the door, catching a brief glimpse of a car speeding away. She looked down to see a manila envelope sitting in front of House's door, with his name typed on to a white label affixed to the center. Without giving much thought to the fact that it was addressed to House, Amber undid the brass clips and walked inside, shaking out the envelope. She gasped.

Inside the envelope were five or six Polaroid shots, all showing Wilson, his arms handcuffed behind him, with a blindfold over his eyes and sitting in an awkward stance. Amber simply pointed, unable to say anything, as House stared at them as well.

House reached out and turned over one of the shots. On the back was a label with the same Courier type as the address on the front of the envelope:

Hello, Dr. House. I have something of yours. If you want to get him back alive, I will let you know what you need to do. Until then…

If you tell the cops, he dies. If you tell Lisa, he dies longer.

I'll be in touch.

"Who?" Amber said, finally regaining the ability to speak. "Who would do this to him?"

"Handcuffs," House murmured, pointing to the picture and trying to keep himself from throwing up. "I _know_ who would do this… Get your stuff, we're going on a trip." He turned, without further comment, and grabbed his coat before opening the door. Amber stood still a moment, trying to take it all in, before stuffing the pictures back in the envelope and taking them along.

A moment later, they were inside House's car, and Amber was frantically trying to buckle her seatbelt as he hit the gas and bounded down the road.

"Where are we going?" she asked, swallowing harshly.

"The police station."

* "Photograph" – Ringo Starr, _Ringo,_ 1973.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Private Eye

"_At the right place at the right time  
>I'll be dead wrong and you'll be just fine…"<em>

The off-beige wooden door in Princeton Police Station, which read "Detective Michael Tritter" in black, block font and, under it in a font that didn't match, "Detective Miranda Bennett", flew open with a sickening_ crunch_, slamming into the file cabinet and jarring Tritter's nameplate loose. It clanged as it fell against the tile floor, reverberating through the office, but Tritter didn't have much time to consider that as there was a furious, cane-wielding man directly in front of him, screaming at the top of his lungs.

"What the hell did you do with him?" the man was screaming, and Tritter quickly recognized this man as Dr. Gregory House, someone he hadn't seen in four years. The detective stared at him, trying to figure out what response he should give, considering he had no idea who "he" was or, by extension, what he had done to him.

"Who?" he finally settled on, noticing for the first time an equally angry looking woman with long, honey blonde hair glaring at him.

"Wilson!" House screamed in response. "If you want to come after me, come after me, don't come after him! You think I wouldn't realize it was you?" Tritter blinked.

"Apparently, because it wasn't," he replied calmly, meeting House's eyes. "Sit down, seriously. What happened to Wilson?" House looked back at him, surprised and more than a bit embarrassed.

So maybe Tritter had been an obvious, but perhaps ill-chosen suspect. He did have a motive, though.

He'd felt humiliated by House – _four years ago._

He could have lost his job because of House – _but apparently didn't._

He seemed like the kind of guy who would do something like this – _but he was looking as confused as House was. _

"Sit down," Tritter repeated. House took a seat in one of the three chairs across from the detective, and Amber sat next to him, giving him a questioning look. "Now, what happened to Wilson?"

Amber wordlessly placed the envelope on Tritter's desk, and House glowered at her.

"There can't be any cops on this – you see what the note says," he muttered angrily. "I'm not risking Wilson." Tritter opened the envelope and slowly pulled out the Polaroids, holding them by the edges so as not to interfere with the fingerprints. His eyes opened in shock.

"Dr. House," he said quietly, pointing to one of the pictures. "You seriously thought of _me_ first with this? You really think a slight – a thermometer, four years ago, would lead to _this_?" House looked at him, beginning to shift slightly in his seat, and Amber looked over at him impatiently before gesturing towards Tritter.

"Who is this guy and why are we here?" she snapped at him. House let out a sigh.

"Okay, I just… I tried to think of who my enemies were, who would want to hurt me through Wilson, and I saw the handcuffs and I thought you were to blame," he admitted sheepishly. "I thought you still held a grudge." The detective sighed.

"I can keep all the cops off of this. But this is big, Dr. House," he said, shaking his head sadly. "Dr. Wilson may be in real danger. I want you to have me on tap for this if you insist on trying to find him alone, okay?" He paused. "Which I know you will, because you're incredibly stubborn." He didn't wait for an answer to that statement. "Hand me your cell phone."

"My cell phone?" the diagnostician asked, still staring at Tritter. The detective gave an impatient motion, and House fished in his pocket, placing the phone in Tritter's palm.

"I'm putting my direct line in here. You call, I will have people out in a second," he told House and Amber firmly as he pressed a number of buttons and then handed the phone back.

"How do I know I can trust you?" House retorted. "You hate me – hell, five minutes ago I thought y_ou_ were behind this."

"Because I'm a police officer, House," Tritter said quietly. "I'm an ass, that's true – but I don't let innocent people die because of a grudge. But we have to figure out who might. Who besides me has a problem with you?" Tritter wished he had poured himself another cup of coffee, as he prepared for a very long list.

"Some patient's families, I guess," House replied, not meeting Tritter's eyes and instead looking at Amber. When her eyes were just as hard to meet, he stared at the wall instead. He couldn't quite make this real. _Someone has Wilson and might hurt him._ The thought seemed so unreal, so ridiculous, that he wanted to burst into hysterical laughter. "Edward Vogler? I cost him his job as chairman of PPTH…"

"When was that?" Tritter inquired.

"Seven years ago." The detective shook his head and gestured, palm up, to the photos again.

"No – first of all, Vogler has enemies all over this town, he doesn't even have the time or resources to go after all of them. And this isn't seven years ago. This is recent. I've never handled a kidnapping case besides non-custodial parents taking off with their children, but I studied the rationale, and this is something recent. Is there anyone you upset recently?" Tritter paused, looking at the note again. "Someone who would refer to Dr. Cuddy as 'Lisa'?"

House's face went pale white. Why didn't he think of it before? Why had he needed _Tritter_ of all people to point it out?

Maybe it was just wishful thinking on House's part, maybe – maybe Tritter would have been a better captor for Wilson. At least Tritter seemed to have some sense of honor, of doing the right thing – well, maybe at least.

"Detective Tritter," House whispered, "Is it very easy to get this kind of handcuff if you're not a cop?"

Tritter looked at the photograph again.

"These look like police-issues cuffs," he replied. "You'd probably have to know a cop or work with the police to get them." He paused. "Which doesn't really narrow it down – I mean, animal control officers, parking authority, private investigators…"

"Private investigators," House whispered. _Lucas._

* "Private Eye" – Alkaline Trio, _From Here to Infirmary_, 2001.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five: Purity

**A/N: There is violence in this chapter, be warned. **

"_Put me in a homemade cellar,  
>Put me in a hole for shelter,<br>Someone hear me, please; all I see is hate,  
>I can hardly breathe, and I can hardly take it…"<em>

Wilson felt his unknown captor behind his head, untying his blindfold, and suddenly he could see, and even if this fairly dark room – which had to be some kind of basement, he deduced – it hurt to see now.

His eyes adjusted slowly, and he could see the outline of a form standing in front of him, the man's hands behind his back, seemingly waiting patiently for Wilson to make a comment.

"What are you doing?" Wilson whispered, "Where am I?" The man in front of him let out a chuckle, as if this was a terribly amusing situation, and it was there, in that laugh, that Wilson was certain he could feel his heart stop as he recognized Lucas Douglas. "Lucas?" He swallowed hard. "Why do you have me tied up?" He would have to try and reason with him… He would get him to let Wilson go and then everything would be okay. There had to be an easy solution to this.

"Because," Lucas replied, tilting his head downward and looking at his captive, "Your _friend_ Dr. House has destroyed my life… He stole my girlfriend." Wilson could hear pure hate in the voice. "I was with Lisa – we were engaged, we were going to have a wonderful life together – me, her, and Rachel. But no, she decided she was still helplessly in love with the one and only Greg House." Wilson couldn't see the blow before he felt it, an open-handed slap across his face that made his jaw shake and his eardrums rattle.

"Please," Wilson whispered. "Don't do this. Let me go. You don't want to do this." He was rambling now, and the fear was beginning to hit him now. It was tingling all over his body and crawling deep into his stomach, and he could feel a pain in his chest as acutely as he could feel the pain in his jaw. He could almost see the red mark forming, could visualize it and could only wonder whether Lucas was looking at him now with guilt – _oh God please let it be guilt_ – or maybe satisfaction – _maybe if it's satisfaction he'll let me go soon_. But when he managed to see his captor, when Lucas crouched down and looked into Wilson's scared brown eyes, Wilson saw only wonder, and that terrified him the most.

"Actually, I do," Lucas replied. He tilted his head again and gave a smirk that was almost childish, one that would be cheekily sweet if it wasn't matched with eyes that seemed to want nothing more than to watch Wilson suffer. "You can thank Dr. House for that… You see, I thought House and I were friends. He doesn't have many friends, now does he Dr. Wilson?" Lucas' hand was running over Wilson's shirt now, and the oncologist was squirming. "But he just saw what he wanted… and took what he wanted and what he wanted…" Lucas pulled on Wilson's shirt roughly, yanking it forward and tearing it as Wilson cried out in shock. "What he wanted was my fiancée." Lucas let go of the shirt, and disappeared out of view; Wilson began to breath a sigh of relief that was cut short by Lucas' reappearance with a pair of scissors. As the P.I. began cutting through Wilson's shirt – _I like this shirt too, what the hell is this,_ Wilson thought irrationally – he continued, "So I decided to take something he wanted." The words were in a sing-song voice.

"You can't do this, Lucas," Wilson pleaded, "You're a good person. You know this is wrong. It's not House's fault that Cuddy wanted him and it's not yours either. They have a long history, now please, just put the scissors down and let me go before people start getting worried about me." _Amber,_ he thought with a surge of guilt, _she'll be wondering where I am… _

Wilson felt his shirt fall away, and then felt the scissors beginning to cut away his pants as well. This was not good, this was so very not good and Wilson's brain was running in overdrive – _try to get anywhere but here,_ he thought quickly, _if I detach myself then the sooner it's over, right? _

That thought was countered by another – _stay here and try to talk him out of it; Lucas is a reasonable man, you can reason with him._

"I won't go to the cops," Wilson continued frantically, "If you just let me go right now. My girlfriend is going to miss me, she probably already knows I'm missing and she's going to…" Wilson gasped out as Lucas pulled away his pants, revealing only his boxers and leaving him feeling painfully exposed and vulnerable.

"I want you to shut up," Lucas snarled, and he disappeared again. Wilson closed his eyes tightly, trying not to cry as the claustrophobia of being tied here, helpless, began to hit him. Whatever was going to happen to him was going to happen, and he needed to accept that, but he couldn't. There had to be a way out.

When Wilson had been growing up, he'd had a cousin of his, one way more devoted to Judaism than any of his immediate family, decide to pack up and move to Israel. On one trip back, the cousin had mentioned offhand to Wilson that there, military service was obligatory for everyone.

Wilson had been twelve, thirteen, maybe. The conversation wouldn't have made much of an impact if that night he hadn't stayed up, staring at the fuzzy TV in the room he shared with Danny, and ended up flicking on a war movie, one with captured POWs being tortured.

That night, Wilson had dreamt for the first of many times that he'd been forced into military service and captured by some enemy, chained in a cell, and interrogated. He didn't know anything, but no matter, his captors – and in these dreams they never had nationalities, or even faces, just disembodied hands – would come up to him and cut off his fingers. Wilson would awake in a cold sweat, sobbing and terrified, and he'd be told to go back to bed and stop keeping everybody up.

Now, this was it, his worst nightmare come true. He was a POW. Worse than that, he was alone – he'd read about POWs in Vietnam keeping sane by tapping messages to one another, but all he had was his captor, Lucas, and the vain hope that he could talk sense into the man.

_Goddamnit, House._

But now wasn't the time to curse House. It wasn't his fault – how the hell could he have known?

Wilson's train of thought was cut off by the reemergence of Lucas, who was holding a blue plastic mug.

"Thirsty?" he inquired, and Wilson nodded. The P.I. raised the cup to Wilson's lips and he drank desperately, trying to swallow as much as he could, trying to ignore the fact that the water didn't taste quite right. A moment later, Lucas replaced the cup on the ground and turned towards a display that was in front and to the left of Wilson, just barely in the oncologist's view. Lucas had, bizarrely, stood up a pink plastic flamingo. "Looks a little like our friend Dr. House, up on one leg, doesn't it?" Lucas taunted. Wilson gave no reply.

Lucas took a step towards the flamingo and picked it up, wordlessly lifting it and bringing his foot down savagely on the good leg. He turned and tossed half the piece of plastic at Wilson's head, narrowly missing him, and disappeared out of view yet again.

* "Purity" – Slipknot, _Slipknot _(original), 1999.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six: Nowhere to Go

"_Save me – I'm falling again_

_Keep me from breaking in a million pieces_

_In the end, no matter what I do,_

_There's nowhere – nowhere to go_

_Nowhere to go but you…"_

"I think I know who did this," House said, his voice uncharacteristically soft as he looked over at Tritter.

"Can you please bother to clue me in?" Amber asked, "I need to know this if I'm going to help you find Wilson." House looked at her and let out a sigh.

"Lucas Douglas," he mumbled, then looked over at Tritter. "That's… off the record, or whatever the terminology is. He's Cuddy's ex-boyfriend. The loft I own? Wilson got his ex to tell him what Cuddy and Lucas bid on it and let me buy it out from under them. Recently, they were engaged, but Cuddy broke it off to be with me instead… Lucas didn't take the whole loft thing well and he sabotaged my place a few times, caused a lot of damage… He's not quite right in the head." He sighed. "But I never thought he'd do anything like THIS."

Tritter reached out and grabbed a pad of paper that he'd received at some irritating career fair where he'd been forced to sit at a booth.

"That's L-U-C-A-S?" Tritter inquired as he scribbled down the name. "Any middle name?"

"Not that I know of," House replied. His brow furrowed in worry. "Please don't let him know that you're on to him… if it even is him… fuck… Please don't do anything that might get Wilson hurt." Tritter looked up and locked his eyes with House's.

"I will not do anything to let him know we know, okay? I promise. I've been a detective for thirty years, I can fly under the radar rather effectively," he assured.

The door to the office opened again, and this time a woman walked in, dressed in the same dark blue uniform that Tritter wore. She could best be described, however, as a physical opposite of the white-blonde, mid-50's Caucasian, however – she was caramel-skinned and slight, about five feet tall, with pitch-black wavy hair that had been corralled into a bun. She appeared to be no older than thirty.

"Hey, Trit," she called as she looked at him, then at House and Amber, and then at the manhandled door. "Your name fell off again." House looked up and gave her a penetrating glare, from which she took a short step back.

"Dr. House and…" Tritter paused, looking at Amber.

"Dr. Volakis," she supplied curtly, getting a bit tired of all of these interruptions and wanting to just run down the bastard who had taken her boyfriend.

"Dr. Volakis. This is my partner, Detective Miranda Bennett. Would it be all right if we told her about what you told me? I assure you it will go no farther than her - I trust her with my life," Tritter said quietly to the two. House looked at Tritter skeptically. On one hand, the more people who knew what had happened to Wilson, the more chance of it getting back to Lucas – and Wilson was doomed. On the other hand, the more people who knew about what had happened to Wilson, the better the chance of forming a team and being able to save him, instead of being at Lucas' – if that was indeed who it was – mercy.

House couldn't decide.

"Amber… your call," he said quietly. At least if she made the wrong one… Wilson's death would be on her. He couldn't have it be on him – oh, what the hell was he thinking, even? Wilson's death? The words didn't even make any sense.

Amber looked up to meet Miranda's eyes – confused chocolate-brown ones that seemed a bit innocent despite her profession – and said firmly, "You don't breath a word to anyone about this unless we say. Is that agreed? Because so help me God if anything happens to him because we told either of you, I will singlehandedly make sure that neither of you can be hired as a fucking mallcop." Miranda and Tritter both nodded in agreement. Amber opened her mouth and then looked at Tritter, unable to say the words of what had happened to Wilson, her boyfriend, the man she… loved, needed, the man she could get both love and respect from. Her other half. "Go ahead and tell her."

"Detective Bennett," Tritter said, "Do you have any problems with us working a case… without telling Alvarez? Or anyone else?" Miranda shook her head.

"It seems like you all have your reasons for wanting this off the books… We can just investigate on our own time, keep it out of any official record," she replied. "Now, what's going on?"

"A man named James Wilson has been kidnapped," Tritter said bluntly. "Dr. House, his…" he paused a moment, "friend, was contacted by the kidnapper. Told explicitly not to talk to the police. We think we know who might be behind this, a man named Lucas Douglas; he's a private investigator. I need you to dig up anything you can on Douglas – especially any real estate he might have, anywhere he might be keeping Wilson." Miranda looked at her partner and nodded.

"What do I say if Alvarez gets into this somehow and asks why I'm looking this guy up?" she inquired.

"Say…" Tritter paused a moment. "Say we're checking into some drug activity near the University. Douglas might have seen something and we want to check into his credentials before possibly contacting him to get info on it." He tapped his fingers restlessly against the desk. "And periodically make checks on Dr. House and Dr. Volakis. They might be in danger too…"

"He _said_ no cops!" House cut in harshly. "How is sending a cop around supposed to convince him we listened to him?" Tritter smiled.

"Detective Bennett spent six years in vice before becoming my partner," he replied. "When I was investigating you…" He gave House a somewhat sheepish look. "I discovered that you're quite a fan of borderline-legal 'escorts'. If Douglas wants to see you returning to your own life and not acting like anything's amiss, well… what better way?"

"Yeah, but…" House began, "If he thinks I'm cheating on Cuddy with hookers, wouldn't that just make him angrier?" Tritter breathed out, considering this. It was definitely a possibility, and Lucas could definitely decide to hurt Wilson to punish House for a transgression like that, but… Having Miranda be around, at all, was the best chance they had of catching Lucas in the act if he tried to contact House and Amber again, and also keeping them safe. Tritter realized with a sickening feeling that he had to potentially decide between Wilson being tortured and Wilson, House, and Amber all being found in a ditch somewhere.

"Then Detective Bennett will only be there a limited amount of time, each day – but I want her to at least be able to check up on you in case Douglas tries anything against either one of you. It's also better if the two of you stay in the same place," Tritter said finally.

"You want me to stay with House?" Amber asked, skeptical.

"Yes," Tritter replied, "I think you should stay with House." He paused. "What I'm going to say might sound really offensive, but I'll give it to you bluntly – Douglas is out for blood and, to him, you both may seem like easy targets – Dr. Volakis, because you're female, and Dr. House, because of your cane," he gestured, a bit dismissively. "You need to look out for each other. Detective Bennett can't be around a great deal, because we need to keep this quiet and as you've said, we don't want to look suspicious… But I want her to make sure you're okay. We'll try calling you, often, and you need to let the two of us know if Douglas contacts you, okay?" House breathed out.

"What about Cuddy?" he asked, "What if she's in danger?" Tritter let his eyes wander to the photographs on his desk again.

"It looks like he wants her kept out of this, and the less she knows, the better – otherwise she could _become_ a target," Tritter advised.

"Okay," House said quietly. "Let's do this."

Amber snaked out her arm and placed her hand on top of House's right, which was painfully grabbing his shaking cane.

"We're going to get Wilson back," she whispered, "I promise."

* "Nowhere to Go" – Backstreet Boys, _Unbreakable _(Japan version), 2007.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: Nightmare

"_And I know you hear their voices - calling from above  
>And I know they may seem real - these signals of love<br>But our life's made up of choices - some without appeal  
>They took for granted your soul and it's ours now to steal…" <em>

Wilson was still, awhile, when Lucas left again. Maybe he would let him go. Maybe there was still hope. After all, Wilson hadn't done anything to Lucas. It had been House. This was bad, and this was scary, but, Wilson reminded himself, nothing horrible had happened yet. Yes, he'd been slapped across the face, but if that was as bad as it got… Maybe Lucas' whole idea was just to scare the shit out of him and then send him back to House and convince House to break up with Cuddy.

If that was his plan, at the very least the "scare the shit out of him" part was occurring very successfully.

He didn't know how long it had been when he began to notice his vision blurring; there wasn't much to look at in the dingy basement but Wilson had been focused on the remnants of the flamingo – one indicator that all was definitely not well on Planet Lucas, but then again the fact that he'd kidnapped Wilson indicated that pretty well as it was – but now he could only see a pink blur, and as seconds ticked into minutes he was beginning to forget what, exactly, the pink blur actually was.

Until the pink blur turned and began to charge in Wilson's direction.

Wilson let out a cry of surprise, wrestling in his bonds and only succeeding in scratching up his wrists badly, against the metal handcuffs – _so I'm bound with handcuffs. Good to know, though I don't know why. _

His thoughts were quickly becoming incoherent as the blur got closer and closer to him. He realized with a start that his shoes were off – when did Lucas take his shoes off? And his socks, too – he didn't remember. He tried to remember but now the pink blob had teeth and the teeth were getting closer and closer to his toes… Oh shit, fuck, the blob was eating his toes, his right big toe in particular, but it didn't hurt, _why didn't it hurt?_

After all, the nerve centers in his brain should be firing that, _oh my God, my toes are getting eaten,_ but they weren't, he was just sitting there staring and watching this thing – he didn't even know what it was – eat his toes, _well, just one toe at the moment, maybe it will stop, soon_ – and shit, maybe he was in shock, maybe the pain would hit him later, maybe he was still hopped up on adrenaline and _oh, God,_ he wanted to scream but he couldn't remember how to, so he just stared and watched as his toe disappeared off of his foot and then…

Then it disappeared, as quickly as it had appeared. Wilson was instead overcome by the sensation that something was crawling over his body. Snakes, it felt like. Fuck, Wilson hated snakes. He could feel the slime, the scales, making their way down his chest, over his nipples, across his stomach, _shit, is this snake poisonous? Is it going to bite me? _He could no longer remember who kept him here or why, or even exactly why he couldn't move. He felt simply terror, simply the force of a hand taking his stomach and twisting it to the right; he wanted to throw up but he couldn't remember how. Oh fuck, the snake was sliding into his boxers now, into the sensitive… shit, he was fucked, so fucked… it was sliding inside him… It was going to bite him inside and it would kill him, it would hurt so fucking bad, why couldn't he shake it off, why couldn't he get away?

He felt a sharp bite, a harsh jab of pain, and he lurched forward, as forward as he could get, and started to throw up, retch – he wasn't even sure anymore – and then the snake was gone too, Wilson wondered if it had dissolved inside him somehow, rotted, maybe he'd absorbed it into his bloodstream. He wondered giddily if that meant he was part snake now.

"Having fun, Wilson?" came a voice from somewhere, but he didn't know where, he didn't know what was going on and he was scared… Things were so confusing and everything hurt and what happened to the snake? He tried to open his mouth to reply but his mouth felt disgusting and he couldn't remember why. He didn't like his mouth anymore and he wanted to rip it out of his face but he couldn't get his hands free to do so.

"Help!" he finally managed to say, at least he thought he did. "The snakes…" And he was sobbing now. The snakes had to have gone somewhere but he didn't know where. There was the sound of someone laughing, and he wondered why someone was laughing when he had snakes being absorbed into his body. He could feel his stomach getting bigger and bigger until eventually it would burst, and a snake would pop out, or maybe hundreds of snakes that had hatched from snake eggs that had been buried in his stomach.

That image was when he started to cry for House.

There were stabbing pains through his stomach, up into his chest, and everything hurt and he didn't want to be there. He wanted to be home in his bed, safe, where he didn't hurt and wasn't afraid. He didn't even remember what he was afraid of anymore, and he couldn't quite remember what it was like not to feel afraid, to feel safe. He wondered if he had ever been safe, or if every moment in his life had just been leading up to this, to this point when he would just explode in a haze of pain.

That thought was when he started to cry for Amber, too.

- "Nightmare" – Avenged Sevenfold, _Nightmare_, 2010.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Throwing It All Away

"_Late at night when you call my name  
>The only sound you'll hear<br>Is the sound of your voice calling  
>Calling after me…"<em>

House and Amber had reluctantly left, in House's car, returning to House's loft upon Tritter's urging. _We'll call you when we know anything – I promise – the best thing you can do is go home and try and act like everything's normal. _Amber had been leading House by his cane, and the diagnostician had looked like a shadow of his former self, as if most of his will to live had evaporated. The look in his eyes was haunted and empty.

House had gone, but he didn't feel quite gone as Tritter finally got a chance to catch his breath, for the first time since his old rival had stormed through the door. House's voice, terrified, still lingered in the air, still called to him and Tritter couldn't shake the tingling disgust that he felt over every inch of his body.

He did not like Gregory House. If, in fact, he was quite honest, he probably hated Gregory House. Four years ago, he'd have wanted nothing more than to see the man shipped off to jail on that trumped up charge of drug trafficking, wanted nothing more than to smirk in his face and tell him that no, he couldn't always win.

Tritter wished more than anything else that he could take back that feeling from four years ago. Because on those Polaroids that still lay strewn across his desk, he saw that urge taken to the extreme, to its logical conclusion. And it terrified him.

Someone had taken the person House held most dear, the person who basically _was _House's heart, and had done this… had taken him and put him on display, and was taunting him outwardly. It was something Tritter had never seen outside of the movies, outside of _Saw _and_ Seven_ and all of those horror flicks he'd caught when he'd gotten home from work late and there was nothing else on. Something that he hadn't considered could really happen in real life.

Neither Tritter nor Miranda spoke for a long while, and they didn't look at each other. Miranda broke the silence, and Tritter nearly jumped out of his seat when she did. He was still hearing House's voice in his head, that frantic yell, furious and frightened and reminding Tritter less of the diagnostician and more of an animal cruelty case he'd seen, a dog that had been thrown out a trash chute and was shaking and trying to bite anyone who came near.

"You seriously are going to have us investigate a kidnapping without Alvarez finding out?" her voice was quiet, as if she didn't want to quite break the mood; the ghost of House's voice lingered in the room for her, too. "You know this is against all the rules. This is kidnapping. Trit, this is FBI, and you know it." Tritter shook his head.

"Bennett," he said quietly. "We cannot let anyone find out about this. Do you want to be the one to talk to Dr. House and Dr. Volakis when Wilson ends up in a ditch because you had to play by the rules? Because if we tell the FBI, within an hour every television from here to California is going to have his picture, and Lucas Douglas' picture. And look at these photos." He gestured to them, but couldn't bear to look at them again. "This isn't a man who is going to decide it isn't worth it once people start sniffing around, and turn himself in. This is a man who wants to hurt Dr. House – hurt him very badly. And if we make a false move, Wilson's dead. And I can't let that happen. I refuse to let that happen."

"Why do you care so much?" Miranda asked, turning to stare into Tritter's eyes. "I've never seen you so shaken over a case, ever. It's normally all just business to you. Why is Dr. House any different?" Tritter opened his mouth and Miranda cut him off with a glare. "Everyone knows the story of how you almost lost your job because you screwed with him. So why are you so desperate to help him out now?"

"Because," Tritter began, but he couldn't finish the sentence. He opened his mouth, then closed it again, before sighing and continuing, "Look at these pictures, Miranda. Dr. Wilson is a good man… He was willing to go to jail for Dr. House's sake. He's an oncologist. He cures… little kids, with fucking cancer, Bennett!" He threw his hands up in the air. "Dr. Wilson's only crime was befriending a man with as many enemies as Dr. House has. And isn't it time we stopped fucking around? I mean, hell, here half of what we do is drunk underage drinking parties and kids with a half an ounce of weed. This is real crime, Miranda," Tritter hissed, and his partner flinched. The only time he used her first name was when he was deeply emotional, and given that Tritter was the most tightly wound man she'd ever met, that had been maybe once before. "This is real evil. And we have a chance to stop it."

Miranda paused and looked around the office, then she crossed her arms and let out a sigh. She'd be risking her job of the last eight years. She'd be risking being able to be employed anywhere else. She was risking everything she wanted to be. But she knew Tritter was risking so much more – all he had ever wanted was to be a cop, and she didn't think that he knew how to even consider being anything else. He was willing to throw his entire life away for this.

_It's ironic,_ she thought to herself, _that Tritter's only doing this for the second time – and they're both because of Dr. House. _

"Where do we start?" Miranda asked quietly. "We need to figure out where he could be keeping Wilson… It could be his residence… But what if it's an abandoned house, or an old warehouse? We should pull up any places he might have knowledge of… Maybe anywhere he did private investigating gigs at?" Tritter smiled.

"See, Bennett – now you're thinking like a detective."

* "Throwing It All Away" – Genesis, _Invisible Touch,_ 1986.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: Anyone for Tennis?

"_And Fate is setting up the chessboard  
>While Death rolls out the dice<br>Anyone for tennis?  
>Wouldn't that be nice?"<em>

Wilson awoke, feeling his heavy eyelids open slowly, and he couldn't remember where he was or what had happened – who he was, even, for a few moments until little scraps of information drifted out of his sub-conscious. He was James Wilson, he was a doctor, he was…

"Amber…" he heard his voice whimper, for this had to be his voice – there was no one else here, was there? He realized he was terrified but couldn't remember why or what had happened, and he realized that his wrists hurt badly, and his arms too. He heard his voice whimper the name again but he couldn't connect it to a meaning for a few more moments – then slowly, slowly she was in his head, her soft hair, her smile, that way that she'd walk… Where was she? She needed to come get him…

But from where? He couldn't remember. There was sweat all over his body and he couldn't remember why, but it smelled like… like salt, almost, and he wanted desperately to take a bath. And get his hands free, because he couldn't feel them anymore now, which was probably worse than them hurting.

He raised his head as much as he could and he saw eyes, looking into his – dark eyes, angry eyes. There was a hint of sadism behind them and Wilson's terror increased tenfold, flaring up behind his eyes and against his throat.

"Amber," he pleaded again, desperately.

"Interesting," the man before him said in a low voice. "You're pleading for Amber, not for House anymore. Good choice – it's not like House ever _really_ helped anybody."

* * *

><p>House and Amber were silent for the entire drive back to House's place. There was nothing to say, and Amber was focused on the road, on making sure that House didn't run them both into a ditch. He was staring off into space, acting on auto-pilot maybe, and she let out a quiet sigh of relief once they finally pulled into his driveway.<p>

She didn't really remember him opening the door, nor how they got into the upstairs. Tiredness, stress and the need to sleep and hope that this was all just a nightmare and something that would be forgotten and non-existent in the morning were overtaking her, and she needed a bed. She felt relief when House showed her the guest room, realizing the wisdom in not returning to she and Wilson's home – sleeping in that same bed would bring with it the realization that Wilson should be there, next to her, and he was not, and might never be again.

She tried to remember what the last thing she'd said to Wilson had been. What had it been?

_That morning she'd woken up early and went in to take a shower. She'd gotten sidetracked and taken too long; he'd knocked on the door, told her he'd be late. She'd hurried up but she'd growled at him while she was doing it. They'd bickered. _

"_James, we need an extra shower if you're always going to kick me out of it!" she'd said to him._

"_Well, I need to use it, too," he'd fired back. "And I don't take nearly so long!"_

"_Yeah, well, it's easier when you're a guy, I figure. Why don't you go use House's shower next time? You're over there enough."_

_They'd made up and he'd gone to work… Or had they? Had they made up, had Wilson given her a kiss as she'd gone out the door, or had they left in a huff for both of their works, not speaking to each other?_

_Why couldn't she remember? _

House broke her out of her thoughts.

"Everything should be right here. Bathroom's down the hall," he told her, and disappeared down the steps. She stared around, knowing she needed sleep, needed it desperately but couldn't chase a feeling of guilt for sleeping in a nice bed while Wilson was chained to… _Oh, God._

Amber lay down in the bed and shut her eyes, pulling the covers over her head like she was a little girl again, six or seven and afraid of things coming to get her in the night, so utterly unlike the persona she exuded now.

She felt sleep overtaking her and she fought it, fought the loss of control but she lost.

_She was on the phone, the phone in her apartment that was now also Wilson's apartment. The big red phone that she'd jokingly thought looked like one of those phones that people in movies used to call in nuclear strikes. _

_She was talking to her parents; to her mother to be exact while her father listened in, she must have been on speakerphone._

_She was telling them about what had happened to Wilson._

"_I'm terrified… He's been kidnapped. I don't know what to do."_

"_Well, why are you surprised, Amber?" her mother's voice intoned, disembodied on the receiver of the blood red phone, "Everything you touch gets destroyed. Everyone you love gets destroyed. You leave a path of destruction in your wake because you _just don't care._"_

She jerked awake and had to stop herself from screaming out. She lifted one leg off of the bed and on to the hardwood floor. There were things in her head, voices in her head and she wanted them out. She didn't want to sleep again.

She started walking out the door of the room, heading downstairs, not knowing what she was looking for – but once she reached the bottom of the stairs she swallowed hard and opened her mouth, wondering if she could escape to the top before she was noticed. Because this wasn't good.

In House's living room, he was standing, leaning on his cane, gesturing – and she couldn't quite hear what he was saying, not yet, but she could see he was talking to Dr. Lisa Cuddy, who was leaning against House's doorframe. And she had just turned her head.

And she had just spotted Amber.

_Oh, fuck. _

* "Anyone for Tennis (The Savage Seven Theme)" – Cream, _Strange Brew: The Very Best of Cream, _1983.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten: Turn the Page

"_Later in the evening  
>As you lie awake in bed<br>With the echoes from the amplifiers  
>Ringin' in your head<br>You smoke the day's last cigarette  
>Remembering what she said…"<em>

Amber hadn't felt so much like a deer in the headlights since the day House had told her that yes, she'd played the game the best, but that she needed to accept that she could be wrong, needed to accept losing, and that she was fired.

She swallowed, looking from Cuddy to House and back again, and the moment felt eternal, as if she were hanging in the air, suspended, and if she breathed then she'd come tumbling down.

"House?" Cuddy's voice broke into her thoughts, sharp and angry. "What's _she_ doing here?" Amber would have normally deflected it, either acted like she didn't really care – even though she did – or made up a lie on the spot or even maybe told the truth. But the truth this time would kill Wilson and she couldn't move her lips to form words to say anything else. She was frozen in her spot.

House looked back and forth between the two women, pausing, and Amber swallowed again, before making a decision – she'd tell Cuddy enough of the truth to get House out of potential deep water, but not enough to hurt Wilson.

"Wilson didn't come home last night," she said quietly, then paused, not sure whether it was last night or tonight, "Or tonight… And I didn't know where he was. I thought he might be over here. He wasn't, and I was shook up and didn't want to go home, so House let me crash in his guest room." She yawned, reaching her hands up through her hair, trying to remember how long she'd slept and trying to figure out how she'd even managed to sleep at all – House obviously hadn't slept a second, and Amber couldn't help but wonder if Cuddy had dropped in or whether House had called her for some reason.

Cuddy looked suspicious, then concerned.

"House – when you called me earlier, about Wilson… He still never came back?" She raised her eyes in worry. "Where could he be?"

"We don't know," House replied quietly. "We can't report him missing until he's been gone for 24 hours." _Even though we already kind of did,_ House added internally, _but Cuddy shouldn't know that – shouldn't know there's a reason to be worried, a reason to be terrified._

"I'm sure he'll turn up soon," Cuddy said, but she couldn't make herself really believe the words. She had come by just to spend time with House, her mother was watching Rachel (she'd demanded to spend time with her and Cuddy had given in and obliged on the rationale that she needed a break, too) and she'd just wanted to see him, feel him, she missed him even though she'd seen him at work. Now that feeling was giving way to a sense that everything wasn't right, and maybe House and Amber weren't telling her everything. Maybe House was trying to protect her from some knowledge that would hurt her – but why? Wilson was House's friend more than Cuddy's and anything he might have done wrong would hurt House first, Amber second – if she even _could_ be hurt, and Cuddy wasn't entirely sure that was possible. Cuddy turned her gaze on House again. "Would you like me to stay?" House looked at Amber.

"You two catch up," Amber murmured, "I'll head back and try to sleep again." _House needs his comfort,_ she thought wryly, _and what does it hurt me if he gets it? I need to go try and sleep again… if I'm rested, I'll be sharp and if I'm sharp, I can get James back, and then I won't need comfort – I'll have him. _She couldn't quite remember gliding up House's stairs into the guest room but suddenly she was there again, climbing under the covers again, making plans. _I need to figure out what we're going to do about Tritter if he's going to be any help to us at all. I need to figure out what role he plays. He has to play a role… if I can make this into a game, then I know I can win. And then James is safe, he's safe…_

Downstairs, House was still staring at Cuddy.

"I'm scared," he admitted in a quiet voice. "I don't know where he could be." Cuddy reached out and clutched his hand in hers, squeezing gently.

"We'll find him. I promise. It's most likely nothing… Maybe he got called away on a case or something with his family, even." Cuddy didn't believe that for a second – she'd never seen Wilson's family in all the years he'd worked at PPTH, and even if he was going away to work on a case or, perhaps, deal with one of his three ex-wives, there'd be no reason not to tell Amber or, at the least, House, where he was going.

No, there was certainly something wrong here, and Cuddy couldn't shake the feeling that House wasn't telling her everything. Had House done something to drive Wilson away?

Cuddy shook her head and broke out of that thought. There wasn't anything that could push Wilson away, not if nearly getting thrown in jail on House's behalf hadn't done the trick.

Wilson was in danger, but how or why or how much House knew, Cuddy couldn't know, and helplessness was spreading through her, tingling up her spine and tormenting her – she hated this. What could she do? She couldn't save Wilson, she couldn't save House from this. All she could do was try to be with House through this, even if he wouldn't tell her everything.

"I love you," she whispered, and raised her right hand to House's face, touching him gently on the cheek with her fingertips in an feathery brush. "I adore you. Sit here with me." She moved to sit down on House's couch, gesturing for him to join her, which he did slowly, haltingly.

She wrapped her arms around him and she couldn't have said for how long, only that when she finally left the sun had begun to rise in the sky and she was no closer to figuring out what had happened to Wilson.

* "Turn the Page" – Bob Seger, _Back in '72,_ 1973.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven: The Game

"_You always wanted people to remember you  
>To leave your little mark on society<br>Don't you know your wish is coming true today?  
>Another victim dies tonight…"<em>

Lucas ran one finger down his left cheek, feeling the light stubble, and he smiled. It was one of the first times he'd smiled in weeks, since the day Lisa had come home and told him that she was so sorry, she had to break their engagement, because she'd realized that she had always been in love with House.

Fucking House.

Lucas had decided pretty early on that Greg House was a pretty pathetic man. Then again, pretty much anyone who called on him for his P.I. services tended to be pretty pathetic.

When he'd started dating Lisa, he'd realized just how deep that label ran. Lisa had told him, in that hushed tone of please-don't-tell-anyone-I-told-you-this, that House had hallucinated having sex with her while being perpetually overdosed on Vicodin. And someone didn't get much more pathetic than that.

Lucas smirked. He wondered how a man who'd hallucinated having a sexual encounter would react to the photos he'd sent of Wilson, and, better yet, to the video he was now uploading into his e-mail. Unfortunately, the firewall and proxy were slowing down upload speed, but Lucas knew patience.

That was an important part of being a P.I., after all. One must always be patient.

He smiled again; this was really a trend this past hour. He'd enjoyed, even if he didn't entirely like enjoying, Wilson's horror and anguish and pain. He enjoyed imagining the look on House's face, too – but it bothered him that he couldn't see it.

He'd have to make contact soon. Make House understand that this was all his fault, for taking his Lisa away. _Shatter him into a million pieces and then Lisa won't want him anymore and she'll want you again once she realizes again that House is nothing other than broken, broken…_

He placed his hand gently on the mouse he'd connected to his laptop. 36% uploaded.

_Oh well. Anything worth doing is worth doing right – and anyone worth breaking is worth breaking right._

* * *

><p>Michael Tritter sat on his hideous, but comfortable couch - blue and army green vertical stripes – and stared at the bottle of Jack Daniels that greeted him on the TV table that sat in front of him.<p>

_Greg fuckin' House._

He swallowed and he reached out, unscrewing the top of the bottle and trying desperately to chase the images that were flooding his subconscious out of his mind, images of James Wilson tied up, suffering, in pain… Images of the terrified look on House's face and on the face of Dr. Amber Volakis.

Tritter was in so far over his fucking head and he knew it.

He closed his arms around the neck of the bottle and tilted it back, into his mouth. He knew that drinking was the only way he was going to get to sleep tonight, and he knew that when he did sleep he'd dream of Wilson, crying and calling to him, going "Detective Tritter, why did you let me die? Do you hate House so much?"

He shuddered and the bottle shook. He couldn't let Wilson die.

The doorbell rang and he nearly dropped the bottle; in his mind's eye he could see it rattle to the dingy blue carpet on the floor and maybe shatter into a million pieces – ones that Tritter would step on and be picking out of his feet for years to come as he'd remember Wilson's pleas in his head. He placed it on the table and carefully got up; he walked to the door and opened it to see Miranda, leaning impatiently on his railing and dressed in a stretchy black shirt and a pair of jeans, with a large black bag slung over her shoulder.

Without any words of introduction, Miranda pushed by him, walking into his living room and snatching the remote off the top of the TV.

"_Breaking Bad_'s on," she said by way of explanation, and quickly changed the channel to AMC. The recap of what had happened on the previous episode began, and Miranda took that moment to cross into Tritter's kitchen and open his fridge, to discover there was nothing in the actual fridge and everything was instead shoved in the freezer. "Your fridge still broken?" she called out before reaching in to grab a can of coke. She shut the door, pulled a bag of sour cream and onion chips off the top of the fridge, and then walked back into the living room.

"So, what's the purpose of this visit?" Tritter inquired, looking shiftily at her as she opened the bag of chips and stuck her hand it to pull a few out.

"We're gonna work," Miranda replied. "We're gonna figure out where Wilson is." She looked at the screen. "Oh, I love this fucking episode." She put down the chips on Tritter's couch and pulled the black bag off of her shoulder, before pulling out of it a sleek silver laptop. Wordlessly, she set it up on Tritter's TV tray, pushing his Jack Daniels to the side without comment.

"Can't you watch TV at home?" Tritter inquired, not bothering to add that she had helped herself to his food and drink as well.

"No," Miranda replied, "My sister Shameeka's staying with us and she brought her two little damn kids. I can't get a moment's rest, let alone watch a damn show about drug dealers. I've been pushed out of my own damn home." Tritter didn't bother to retort that she was pushing him out of his; instead, he tried a different tact.

"This probably sounds racist, but how is your sister Shameeka and you're Miranda? Those names don't exactly go together." Miranda rolled her eyes.

"My parents are notoriously uncreative. Before Meeka was born, my mom saw a show with a girl named Shameeka on it. Before I was born, she saw a show with a girl named Miranda on it. And my little sister got named Niecy because at eleven, I was too obsessed with _Moesha_," Miranda explained happily as she booted up her laptop. She looked at the TV screen, then at Tritter as she sat back in the couch, next to him. "Does it make me a bad cop that I'd bang Jesse Pinkman?"

"Probably," Tritter replied dryly. "What's your plan to find Wilson?" Miranda smirked.

"We're gonna go by process of elimination." She pulled up Microsoft Word and clicked the "bold" button, then "center".

She typed "Places Wilson could be", and then highlighted it. She hit "underline".

"What do you think of Dr. Volakis?" Tritter inquired as he watched the underline appear under the words on the screen.

"She's scary. She must be Wilson's girlfriend," Miranda replied, before typing in, "Douglas' house."

"Where does he live?" Tritter replied. "And she's not necessarily Wilson's girlfriend. She could be House's."

"Thought House was dating that Lisa Cuddy woman," Miranda replied, "Volakis is definitely with Wilson."

"Doesn't seem his type." Miranda snorted.

"Shows how much you know. Douglas lives at 110 Sycamore Street. I found it in the White Pages. Maybe we could take a look at it on Google Earth?" Miranda grinned and let her eyes dance over to the screen, where Hank Schrader was beating up Jesse Pinkman.

"His house might be too obvious," Tritter warned.

"Well, we'll find out, won't we?" Miranda shot back. "How about a barn?" Tritter looked confused.

"A barn?"

"I read in the news about a case where they used a barn," Miranda said defensively. Tritter shook his head and slowly typed in, "barn".

* "The Game" – Disturbed, _The Sickness,_ 2001.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve: Domino

"_Do you know what you have done?  
>Do you know what you've begun?<br>Do you see we shall never be together again?  
>All of my life – <em>

_Lonely people, empty rooms,  
>Pointless violence, silent tombs.<br>Could it be that we shall be together again?" _

Amber dreamt that Wilson was pedaling down the road in a bicycle when he crashed. Amber walked out the door of her house, but it wasn't her house now – she didn't _have_ a house now, she had an apartment – it was… what was it? She'd never had a house – maybe her grandparents', she couldn't quite place it, but she walked out of it and she scooped him up from the road and brought him into the house and then…

Then she awoke and she looked around, not recognizing where she was at first, before it all came flooding back. This was House's place, the loft. And she was here because Wilson was gone.

She swallowed hard, hoping that that part was just a dream, a horrific nightmare, but knowing that it wasn't. She'd have to work with House to figure out a way to save Wilson – there was nothing else she could do. She felt her stomach constrict as she realized that if Wilson died… if Wilson died…

No, she couldn't go there. It just wasn't… Wilson was alive, and she had to focus on that. While Wilson was alive, she could find a way to get him home.

She was smart. House was smart. Between them, they'd find a way. They simply had to.

She climbed off the bed and walked across the creeky boards, hoping that House was already awake so that she wouldn't have the awkward task of going into his room and waking him up. When she arrived at the bottom of the steps, she not only saw him awake, sitting on the couch in front of the TV, but she was sure that he hadn't slept at all.

"Hey," she called quietly, and he looked up, his eyes red with dark circles burned around them.

"Hey," he replied, seeming to look past her instead of at her. Looking at her made it all real, made Wilson really gone, and he couldn't quite accept that – not yet.

"Are you going to work today?" she asked, trying not to let any judgment creep into her voice. _Just make it an innocent question._

"I have to," he said, turning to stare at the TV, which appeared to be turned to coverage of Casey Anthony's trial. She knew he wasn't really paying attention because she was sure that he couldn't actively watch people feverishly discussing kidnapping and duct tape and murder right now. He was just staring at white noise. "I have to act like everything's normal or Lucas will know I went to the cops." His voice was dead, quiet and broken.

"Why don't I call in and go talk to Tritter while you go to work?" Amber suggested. "There's no way I'm going to get anything done, and the hospital needs you more than it needs me." She smiled with a hint of self-deprecation.

"You deal with Tritter?" House asked with a snort. "Yeah, that'll go well. You don't even know what you're getting into. Just let him do this thing and stay out of it." Amber glared back at him.

"Tritter's an idiot," she replied bluntly. "And therefore needs our help if he's going to ever get Wilson back. If we all put our heads together, we can figure it out…"

"No, we can't!" House retorted, standing up as he yelped, his voice strangled. "We can't get him back – we just have to hope Lucas has a change of heart. I'll do whatever he wants me to do."

"You can't seriously be discussing negotiating with a crazy kidnapper!" Amber declared.

"If it gets Wilson back…"

"It won't. The only thing it will do is make Lucas even more comfortable in his position. He'll just demand more and more concessions from you," Amber snapped back. "We need to beat him at his own game. We need to figure out how he thinks and head him off."

"And if Lucas figures out we're sniffing around, Wilson is dead!"

"Wilson is dead if we don't do anything!" Amber screamed. "He's dead if we don't do everything in our power to bring him home. You want to just sit here like nothing's wrong and depend on the goodness of Lucas' heart? I don't think you do." She pointed her finger at him. "You're just terrified that your misstep will kill Wilson, well you know what? I'm just as terrified. But I can't stand here and do nothing, I can't hope that Lucas feels bad. The sooner we get Wilson back the sooner we can be with him instead of this constant waiting for the other shoe to drop!" She was shaking now, and she clenched her fist and swallowed hard. "So I'm going to talk to Tritter whether you like it or not." House swallowed and paused for a long moment. Finally, he nodded.

"Okay," he replied quietly. "Do what you need to do… I'll go to work… If I hear anything I'll let you know and if you find out anything you'll let me know?" There was a note of pleading in his voice that made Amber feel like she'd been splayed open and dissected. House didn't say anything more; instead, he simply crossed the room and then disappeared up the stairs, where Amber could hear the shower running. She walked to where she'd dropped her purse the night before and reached down, pulling out her phone and dialing her boss' number before hitting the green "call" key.

"Hello?"

"Hi, this is Dr. Volakis."

"Oh," the woman's voice on the other end replied, not without a bit of distaste seeping through. "How can I help you?"

"I need to call out today," Amber replied, trying desperately to sound as if she was deeply hurt by that fact. "I've got a nasty case of the flu."

"Okay, well, make sure you're in tomorrow. Take care of yourself, Dr. Volakis." The dial tone sounded in her ear and Amber pressed the button to hang up. As soon as House went off to work, Amber would drive out to Tritter… and tell him what? She'd never met Lucas and heard of him only vaguely; she knew he was a private investigator and that he'd been engaged to Cuddy for a while, which had basically cut House wide open, before Cuddy had decided she wanted House instead and dumped Lucas and broke the engagement. _That's the extent of my knowledge._

That would just have to be what she'd have to work with, then… She would just have to make it work.

House's footsteps down the stairs followed that thought, and Amber swallowed, not sure she really wanted to walk outside and have to face the reality of all of this. But she didn't have any choice, and she couldn't get overemotional. She had to think about all of this rationally, or else Wilson would pay the price. She had to keep to her advantage that Lucas might not even know that she knew Wilson had been kidnapped.

House walked out the door without saying a word to Amber; she wasn't particularly surprised. Just because this had driven them together didn't mean they got along any better than they ever had. They were just two people who happened to love Wilson. Who happened to_ need_ Wilson. They were the two people who were going to do anything to get Wilson back.

After House's car pulled off, Amber walked out the door and let it swing locked behind her, before walking out to her own car and opening it, hopping in the driver's side and taking a deep breath.

_Here goes nothing._

* "Domino (In the Glow of the Night/The Last Domino)" by Genesis, _Invisible Touch_, 1986.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen: Runaway

"_Graffiti decorations  
>Under a sky of dust<br>A constant wave of tension  
>On top of broken trust…"<em> * 

House was back at work, whether he wanted to be or not. He didn't have a case and he was both thankful for that and wishing that he did – he didn't have a case to distract him from the thoughts going through his brain but he was also sure that if he did have one, he wouldn't be able to focus on it and he could miss something while his brain was choked with thoughts of a scared Wilson locked away somewhere.

"House? You okay?" Foreman's low voice cut into his thoughts and he shook his head, then perched his head up on his cane.

"It's just a bad day," he said with a brush off. "Are there any cases that any of you think we should take? Otherwise, we're standing around talking about me, and no one wants that."

Masters raised her hand eagerly, and the others gave her a look.

"34-year-old female with delusions and trouble walking…"

"Boring," House declared.

"I haven't even finished…" Masters began.

"You'd have cut to the interesting part first. Next."

"20-year-old male with tunnel vision," Chase started.

"Boring. Is that all?"

"That's all," Chase admitted, and he stared as House proceeded to get up and walk out of the conference room.

"Something's wrong with him," Foreman declared, his lips pursed in unusual concern.

"How do you know?" Chase inquired, "And why do you care?"

"I can tell. He's distracted."

"Cuddy probably distracted him," Taub cut in, rolling his eyes, "And I'd rather not know the details of that."

"And I'd rather you not know the details of that, either," said the voice of Lisa Cuddy, who had just entered the room. The fellows could see the same distracted, worried look on her face that had been on House's. "But that's not what's wrong with House." She looked at them authoritatively. "He's not to know that you know this, but you should know. Wilson is missing."

"Missing?" Masters asked, gasping.

"He never came home last night. House is… understandably, upset. Take it easy on him and don't mention this conversation. Got it?" And as quickly as she had entered the room, Cuddy was gone. As soon as she was out of earshot, the team burst into hurried conversation.

"Missing?" Masters echoed again. "What could have happened to him?"

"Who would want to hurt Wilson of all people?" Chased added. "He doesn't really have any enemies."

"Maybe it was…" Foreman began, but he stopped as he realized any suggestions he could make on what may have befallen the oncologist wouldn't help matters.

"Oh, come on," Taub cut in. "You're all acting like something is really wrong with him." Foreman stared at him.

"Did you not hear?" he barked. "He's missing. I think that's the definition of wrong."

"No, that's the definition of missing," Taub retorted. "He probably wanted to get away from the neverending series of drama that having both House and Amber in his life bring."

"I don't know," Chase replied, "If I was dating Amber I'd never leave the house." Taub rolled his eyes.

"I still think there's something really wrong," Foreman said, "And I think we should look into this. It's not like Wilson to run off. He knows what that would do to House and as exasperated as he acts, he really does care for him."

"So how do we look into it?" Masters asked.

"We could talk to the cops," Chase suggested.

"Yeah, sure, because they're going to let us in on their investigation on someone who doesn't want to be found. Wilson will come back, or he'll stay gone. We have better things to do than go hunt down House's runaway friends," Taub complained.

"Listen, Taub," Foreman fired back, "Just because you'd run away rather than dealing with your own marriage woes doesn't mean Wilson would, or that he did."

"So what do we do?" Masters asked.

"Nothing, right now," Foreman replied, glaring at Taub. "But if you give a shit about Wilson's well-being, then come to my office when your shift is over."

House tried desperately to focus on the medical journal he was reading, but he couldn't stop his brain from hovering, flittering over to the unthinkable. He wanted nothing more than to see Wilson march into his office and tell him that, for some reason or another, he was being an idiot.

He found himself logging into his e-mail, desperate for a distraction. Maybe he'd try and play another round on his Game Boy or even just make up a list of… something.

_One new message _flashed on the screen. The return e-mail was hidden, and the subject was "Keeping you updated."

He clicked it, all the while he knew that he shouldn't – somewhere in his mind he knew exactly what he'd find, if not specifically then certainly generally and he also knew that there was no way in hell he wanted to open that e-mail.

But he owed it to Wilson.

And when the e-mail had a video attached, he clicked "play" and refused to let himself close his eyes, made himself feel every pain with Wilson because this was all his fault. He'd been cocky before, he'd screwed with people before and he'd hurt Wilson before, but never this badly – this was far worse than a towed car or even a shut down practice. This could shatter Wilson – what was he thinking, this _was_ shattering Wilson right before his eyes, and despite the fact that Wilson must know it was House's fault, he was crying for him, pleading for him.

Wanting House to take the pain away. But House couldn't.

House reached out and pressed his fingers to the screen, wanting to hold Wilson, to hold him tight and promise him that he'd never let anyone hurt him again. To cry and to apologize, to say he never meant it to get this far because he never did.

Gritting his teeth, House hit the "forward" button and sent the clip to Tritter. He didn't want to… didn't want someone else, never mind that it was someone as appalling to him as Tritter, to see Wilson like this – but there was a chance, maybe Tritter could trace it, could see some clue, maybe he recognized something.

_Wilson,_ House thought desperately. _I'm sorry. But I'm getting you back. Whatever it takes.  
><em>

* Linkin Park – "Runaway", _Hybrid Theory_, 2001.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen: Dreaming While You Sleep

"_All my life, I'll be haunted by,_

_All my life – just one moment in time_

_All my life – and only I'll know why…"_

Patience had never been one of Tritter's stronger points. He was currently standing in line at the Wendy's a few miles down from the police station, watching as an older woman dressed in a Wendy's uniform chatted merrily with an older man. They were also standing directly in line, in front of Tritter.

"Excuse me," he said, clearing his throat. "Are you in line?"

"Oh," the woman replied, "No."

"Then would you mind getting the hell out of my way?" Tritter snarled.

"You're rude," the woman complained.

"And you're in my way." Tritter ground his heels into the tile and narrowed his eyes.

About ten minutes later, he climbed into his car carrying his bag of spicy nuggets and his Baconater sandwich, along with a chicken sandwich for Miranda as he knew she would eventually end up eating most of his food anyway.

His small battle with the obnoxious individuals in line – wasn't _anyone_ considerate anymore? Anyone? – had allowed him to shift his focus from the worry that would be facing him today – how to track Douglas and how not to end up on the radar as he did so. Best-case scenario, his boss found out and reamed him out for not telling the FBI. Worst-case scenario…

He didn't want to think about that.

Unfortunately, his mind didn't get much of a chance to change the subject, as he walked into the station to find the beautiful Amber Volakis sitting in a plastic chair in the "waiting room" of sorts, with an impatient look on her face and a gleam of urgency in her crystal blue eyes.

"Dr. Volakis," Tritter said quickly, ushering her into his office before Lt. Alvarez could peek in and ask uncomfortable and unanswerable questions about what this woman was doing here. He closed and locked his office door as Amber took a seat in the chair across from his desk. Hopefully Miranda wouldn't need to enter the office immediately after she arrived, or else this could become rather awkward. "What brings you here?"

"I wanted to discuss our plan," Amber replied bluntly. Tritter took her in with his eyes for the first time, having been distracted by the reappearance of House and the entire insane situation the last time he had seen her. She was attractive, but not in a traditional flowery way. There was something deeply methodical about her, and Tritter found himself considering again that he didn't want to get on her bad side.

She was, in her way, much scarier than House. Tritter felt regret on behalf of her patients, already.

"I didn't know that we," Tritter began coolly, "Had a plan. I thought you and House were going to let Detective Bennett and I handle the 'plan', given that we're detectives and it is our _job_ to handle situations like this."

"And what would you rather me do?" Amber retorted. "Wait at home? Eat and sleep not knowing whether Wilson can do either, whether Lucas is letting him? No. House and I are going to help you find him." The look in her eyes gave little room for argument, and the detective sighed.

"Okay," Tritter said after a short pause. "But you need to promise that you and House aren't going to run into any dangerous situations to try and get this guy on your own. I need to focus on saving Wilson, I can't deal with saving you both, too. You need to be willing to listen to me and take direction, even if you don't agree. Do you think you can do that?"

"If it'll help us find James, I can," Amber replied. Tritter nodded and placed his arms behind his back, interlacing the fingers and trying to summon up the cocksure image he so usually presented. It was hard to do that, however, when it felt like not butterflies, but huge winged dragons were flapping around in his heart and stomach. He didn't want to tell Amber all he knew – that the longer a person is held captive, the lower their chances of survival. He didn't want to tell her that he had walked in that day half-expecting to receive a folder on his desk with photos of Wilson's beaten and dead body within the fold.

"Okay, can you just head home, so that… in case he _is_ making the rounds and keeping an eye out, he doesn't see you – and so that Detective Bennett and I can figure out how to proceed? But as soon as we know anything, anything at all… I will tell you." He locked eyes with her, and there was a sincerity, more vulnerable than his usual casual bluntness, to the swirling blues.

"Okay," Amber replied quietly. "But you will really keep me informed? Not just give me platitudes?" Her gaze met him head on.

"I promise." She reached out and shook his hand in hers, as if sealing a contract, before turning and walking to the door. She easily unlocked it and then disappeared into the lobby and, presumably, outside.

With that taken care of, Tritter sat at his desk and turned his attention to his e-mail. The first one to appear was a message from Dr. House; a forwarded message.

The detective could feel a chill start in the blood of his heart, circulating up through his arms and into his legs and his neck. He knew what the video would show before he pressed play.

And yet, he pressed play.

It was all he could do. As he watched, feeling helpless to end Wilson's suffering, his mind was gripped with the worst things he'd seen in his time as a police officer. He remembered little kids who'd gone weeks without eating a real meal because their parents were too cracked-out to feed them or were starving them as punishment. He'd seen women with black eyes week after week, broken bones and broken noses, who would still turn around and walk back in the same house because they had nowhere else to go.

Things like that still got him, still sent a chill up his spine but this… this.

Tritter raced out the door and brushed past Detective Hamilton, a muscle-bound black man with a shaved head, and ducked into the men's room.

He locked himself in a stall and threw up.

* Genesis – "Dreaming While You Sleep", _We Can't Dance,_ 1991.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen: Mama

"_It's hot, too hot for me mama  
>but I can hardly wait<br>my eyes they're burning mama  
>and I can feel my body shake…"<em>

Lucas could still smell Lisa Cuddy's scent on him, when he focused on the thought. He could still hear her voice, see her face in his mind.

Sometimes, when he thought about her, he wanted to hold her – wanted to woo her back, show her that he was caring, gentle, compassionate. Just the man who she needed. Tell her that he would never hurt her, never leave her, that he adored her.

But those times were rare.

Far more often, when he thought of Lisa Cuddy, he wanted to kill her. To destroy her, shatter her like a ceramic plate. Show her what he thought of her bizarre decision to toss away a relationship that had seemingly meant so much to chase a man she had always said was incapable of actually loving another human being. To be with Greg House of all fucking people.

A person Lucas had considered a friend.

Maybe House had "liked" Lisa first – Lucas could see the sense of that particular argument. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

But she hadn't been engaged to House. Never would; that relationship was doomed before it even began.

Just the indignity, though. To be basically left at the altar.

But Lisa didn't deserve to be punished for it, as much as Lucas might have wanted to. This sin was on House's conscience, if he had one; on his soul, if he had one.

The problem with punishing House was that, Lucas knew, House didn't really care what happened to him. The man was in pain every day anyway, what was some more added on to it? Most of all, it was unlikely that he would ever give in, even if he wanted to. He would never apologize to Lucas for stealing away his Lisa.

However, House also had a weak spot, as stealthily hidden as Achille's heel had been. His weak spot was Wilson, the only person who truly held House's heart. Sure, the doctor might think that Cuddy was vital to him, but Lucas knew – Lucas knew.

House cared about Wilson because Wilson was the only person who could ever tolerate the man on a daily basis. The only person who could stare into the void that was there, into the pit, and find a good person.

And Lucas was going to drive Wilson so crazy that he'd curse the day he had ever met Gregory House. And make House watch, besides – who cared if it was digitally? He didn't have to see the reactions to picture them in his mind.

And eventually, he would contact House – when the time was right, he'd usher him in and apply his coup de grace.

A lingering sense of doubt, of shame and of pity for Wilson crept up his spine, and he swallowed it down. He'd lost it all, lost the woman who he was prepared to spend the rest of his life with. This was no time to be decent, to be merciful – and anyway, he already had Wilson kidnapped, if he let him go now he would be identified and arrested. He had no choice but to follow this through.

Wilson thought of how House would save him if he could.

He would burst in, with his cane turned into some sort of huge bazooka-gun, and he'd blast holes in the walls and pull Wilson to safety. But no one, not even the lunatic keeping him locked up here, would be hurt in the process.

Wilson never liked revenge fantasies; they made him sick and worried, frightened about what they would become if he let them get out of hand. It was part of why he let House get away with as much as he did – he had never believed in holding a grudge.

Wilson's parents had held grudges. They had, in their fifty-year marriage, always, always kept score, never let anything pass. He could remember sitting between his two brothers, listening to them argue and scream at each other about who had screwed up that time, could remember wishing that they could just let it go.

He'd then grown into the man who let everything go if it was from someone who mattered vitally. That had destroyed his three marriages, because letting everything go bred resentment like cultures in a Petri dish.

He was jerked out of his thoughts by the determined tap, tap, tap of boots, must be steel-tipped boots, against the cellar's floor. His breath caught in his throat and his eyes squinched shut as he pleaded silently _please, no_, _go away. Not this again. What did I do to you?_

His eyes were still shut as hands clamped around his wrists, pushed him back against the wall. They popped open, however, when Wilson was shocked to feel cold metal against his chest.

Wilson's mind raced ahead of him and realized what they were only a split second before he felt what they were – what they did – what their function –

If he had to give it a sound later, he'd say it sounded like a hiss. But maybe that was only in his head, as he tried to focus on something other than the current that was running through his body. He was hunching, jerking – something – he didn't know.

He couldn't find his voice, his thoughts, or his pleas. He could only grapple desperately, try and get his hands out of the handcuffs, but it wasn't working.

Time stood still, frozen solid. He couldn't even recall his name or the name of the man he'd been hoping would save him.

Which of course meant he was not conscious of the man standing before him, one finger on the trigger of the electroshock unit as the other hand held the camera steady.

_You made me do this, House,_ Lucas reminded himself. The reassurance rang hollow, but it didn't matter.

There was no turning back. Not for him. Not now.

* Genesis – "Mama", _Genesis_, 1983.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen: Handle This

"_You've lost what you can't find  
>Never what you had in mind…"<em>

"No one wants to hear what I think, but I think Taub's dead wrong," Masters spoke up as she sat in the lounge with Foreman and Chase. "And I think we should look, ourselves, into what happened to Wilson."

"So now it's not enough to be doctors, we have to be detectives, too?" Chase retorted.

"You know I'm right," Masters continued. "Neither of you think Wilson just ran off. You both know something happened to him."

"But what can we do about it, though? Just start knocking on doors and knocking heads until we find what we need to know?" Foreman asked.

"Sounds better than sitting on our asses," Chase retorted. "Wilson could be getting tortured or gutted right now while we're sitting around trying to figure out what to do."

"All right," Foreman said, sighing. "Let's… Talk to some people. See if they're heard anything. But no Dirty Harry shit. I'm not getting thrown into prison for doing a bunch of crazy vigilante stuff, because that's not going to help Wilson, either." He groaned and stuck his hands further in his pockets. "Maybe we ought to start looking at places Wilson frequents. But … I don't want to tell House or Amber that we're looking into this. You know how House is, he doesn't want anyone involved in his personal stuff but him. Especially not us."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Chase replied noncommittally. "Well… I don't think they'd have to tell House anything, so why don't we maybe actually check in with the cops? Maybe they'd be willing to tell us if they know anything."

"Chase, man, the cops aren't going to tell us shit. They're just going to tell us to go home and twiddle our thumbs, call them if we 'remember' anything, which of course we don't because this came out of the blue, or they start looking at us as suspects."

"Okay, well, then," Masters broke in, "Why don't we start by brainstorming? Like House has us do with cases? Let's get a whiteboard and put all our ideas down and then we can use deductive reasoning."

"That sounds… reasonable," Chase agreed. "There's another whiteboard in the closet… I'll go get it and meet you guys…"

"Somewhere in the hospital, I guess, but where House won't run into us," Masters suggested. "Or Cuddy."

"We'll end up meeting in the damn closet, then, House could be anywhere!" Foreman protested.

"'Cept the clinic," Chase pointed out with a smirk. "Meet you guys in fifteen minutes in the clinic."

* * *

><p>"We could ask people if they've seen him, if we can figure out where he usually goes," Masters suggested.<p>

"Other than the hospital or home?" Foreman inquired skeptically.

"Maybe he frequents the same coffeeshop or something. We could ask Starbucks or wherever he goes. It could help us figure out a time-table," Masters continued. "If we can figure out the last time anybody at all saw him, we can figure out when he must have gone missing."

"Yeah, but that's not going to tell us where he is now," Foreman replied, sinking his head into his palm. "This all just seems futile. How many missing persons ever actually get found?"

"If you're just going to keep assuming the worst…" Masters countered.

"Come on, you guys," Chase cut in. "We have to settle on a plan of action. Maybe it isn't the 'right' plan of action, but it's better than sitting around arguing. I still say we go check with the cops. It's no use going over territory that's already been… plowed."

"All right," Foreman replied with a sigh, "I'm just wary of going to the cops… You know House and law enforcement aren't exactly best friends."

"Yeah, but didn't we also treat a couple Princeton cops over the last few years?" Chase pointed out. "I mean, they owe us a few."

"One of whom turned out to be corrupt, stealing fertilizer for his pot plants and infecting me," Foreman reminded him with a grumble.

"That's good!" Chase chimed sarcastically. "Play the guilt angle, too. That might get us some points!" Foreman rolled his eyes at him. "C'mon… Let's go. Let's not waste any more time."

* * *

><p>"Okay, maybe this is… I can understand if we may not be… welcome, here, but we want to help you to, uh, find our colleague, our friend and colleague, Dr. James Wilson."<p>

Foreman and Chase both began to wonder whether appointing Masters to do all of the talking had been as good an idea as it had seemed in the car. They had figured that her offer of help would be less insulting (or less suspicious) to the officers than if either one of them would have burst in and told them that, basically, they were doing their investigation wrong and needed the assistance of a bunch of doctors for some reason.

"Okay, so let's backtrack," the detective behind the counter, a tall and muscular African-American man, replied. "Can you give me that name again? James Wilson?"

"Yeah," Foreman cut in, "I don't know what his middle name is… I think his middle initial is A, but I'm not sure."

The detective typed something into his computer and then hit enter, before scrolling down with a somewhat baffled look on his face.

"I'm sorry, but there's no record of a James Wilson being reported missing," he said, looking at the group, confused. "If you'd like, I could talk to my colleagues, maybe your friend talked to Detective Bennett or Detective Tritter?"

Chase and Foreman exchanged looks.

"Detective Tritter," Foreman replied, his eyes narrowing.

"Yeah… I don't know why he wouldn't have put it into the system… but sometimes he likes to kinda work 'off book', if you get my meaning."

"Oh," Foreman said, his eyes smoldering with rage.

"But listen. I'll talk to them both, see what I can find out. If you know anything about Dr. Wilson, call me. Here's my card." The man handed over a business card that read, "Detective Lee Hamilton".

Foreman and Chase turned and walked out of the station, followed by a confused Masters.

"We're on our own," Chase murmured. "We need to find Wilson on our own."

* Sum 41 – "Handle This", _All Killer No Filler_, 2001


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen: If I Needed Someone

"_Carve your number on my wall and_

_Maybe you will get a call from me.._

_If I needed someone…"_

"What are we going to do, Trit? Time is running out and I can't just sit here and twiddle my thumbs," Miranda said as she tapped her laptop so hard that the keys were in danger of breaking. "I feel like we're running around in circles. We've called every single restaurant, gas station and car wash in Princeton and none of them have seen either Wilson or Douglas in the past day."

Tritter sighed, leaning back against his swivel chair.

"We have to get creative."

"How, exactly, do you plan to do that? Legally, mind you – we can't go around breaking legs."

Tritter cocked his head to the side in exasperation.

"I never said we had to act like Dirty Harry."

"You implied it!"

"I did not imply it," he retorted. "And anyway, we don't need to get… unethical, we just need to think outside the box. What's something little that could trip Douglas up?"

"You know, you're right," Miranda responded. "Didn't the Son of Sam get caught for a parking ticket or something like that?"

Tritter snapped his fingers.

"You're on the right track. Think of things that everybody has to do on a daily basis, things where someone could have caught a glimpse of him."

"Uh… go to the bathroom?" Miranda suggested, curling up her nose.

"Nah, that'd just tie in with 'gas station' if they were on the go. What about…" Tritter pressed two of his fingers against his bottom lip. _Think, Michael, think!_ He chastised himself. _Pull some absolutely spectacular shit out of your ass._

"Well, if they haven't stopped at a gas station, that limits how far away they can be, right?" Miranda suggested. "How far can you get on a full tank of gas?" She gestured to a map of the Princeton area hanging in front of them, and picked up a red permanent marker. She leaned over and made a relatively precise circle around the center of map, before making a red dot. "That's where Wilson lives," she explained, refusing to use the past tense. "Probably where he got snatched from. So this is however far Douglas could drive without having to refuel if he had a full tank."

"So we just…?" Tritter began.

"We can try and figure out if any of the properties in the area have had… noise complaints, maybe? Someone had to have noticed something off. You can't just smuggle a person into your basement and not raise any suspicions."

"Unfortunately, you could," Tritter said dryly. "Ever heard of Kitty Genovese? She was stabbed in front of her apartment and everyone just assumed someone else would call." Miranda sighed.

"Of course I have. I was a Criminal Justice major too, you know. But first of all, that was New York – not Princeton. And if we go ask people what they saw, then people might be more forthcoming. Maybe even stuff they didn't realize was important at the time, like somebody with music up way too loud…" Tritter grimaced.

"That would have some implications," he pointed out.

"Way to think positive, Trit," Miranda shot back sarcastically, slapping him on the back. "Come on – now come up with something. I know you can. You're the one who taught me everything I know, yadda, yadda, yadda… Just pretend I gave you praise for twenty minutes and then come up with something genius."

Tritter stared at her a moment, about to make a snarky comeback, before snapping his fingers.

"I think we just witnessed a Tritter moment, folks," Miranda said with a smile.

Ignoring that comment, Tritter exclaimed, "We missed it! We missed it – I missed it, I can't believe it."

Miranda cocked an eyebrow.

"Well, are you going to tell me what we missed, or are we going to play charades?"

"Well, okay, remember how Douglas taunted House over e-mail, about Wilson?"

"Yeah, how could I forget? That was horrid." Miranda shuddered.

"Well, you know how these guys are – they like to escalate."

"I'll take your word for it."

Tritter clasped his fingers together and pulled back his hand.

"Well, it won't be too long before he can't get off – okay, yeah, nasty, I know – on these… delayed reactions. On imagining House's reaction, rather."

"Okay…" Miranda prompted. "Keep going, Hannibal Lecter." Tritter rolled his eyes.

"It's just basic psychology. He's going to want to up the ante to feel like he's gotten revenge." He paused a moment – that was what he had done, right? When he had gone after House? He had kept turning the crank to the rack until he had been close enough to getting what he wanted. That was what Douglas would do. He wouldn't be happy until he'd seen the fruits of his labors, screwed up as they were. "He's going to want to talk to House directly, but showing up, of course, is too risky, even if he does believe House hasn't called the cops on him."

"Okay," Miranda continued, nodding. "Keep going."

"So, what he's going to do is call him. All we need to do is tap House's phone and trace the call."

"…Wait," Miranda cut in. "We don't trust House enough to just go, 'Hey, man, the crazy kidnapper called?'"

Tritter shook his head.

"When emotions are running wild, you can't trust that he's not gonna keep things from us if he thinks it'll save Wilson. I know House is a hothead but Douglas' threats could still get to him." Miranda pressed her toes against the floor.

"What are our chances, Trit? That Wilson gets out of this alive?"

He shrugged.

"Damn it… I wish I knew. I wish we were at the end of this because… well, you know what happens if we misstep. We just need to not misstep. We need to be sure of who we're dealing with. On all sides. It's so hair-trigger."

Miranda stepped a little closer to him.

"We're going to save him, Trit."

"I sure as hell hope so."

* "If I Needed Someone", The Beatles, _Rubber Soul, _1966.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen: Only You**

_"__Only you__ can make this world seem right _

_Only you can make the darkness bright…"_

House and Amber had been sitting in House's apartment for twenty-five minutes, and neither had said a word yet. They were just looking at each other, then looking away, then each independently thinking about Wilson, worrying about Wilson, wishing Wilson were safe and there to tell the two of them to either talk to each other or go home. He would smile that smile of his and humor them, listen to whatever they had done to piss one another off this time, and then he would work it out, much as he would probably later say he regretted doing so.

"When do you think they'll find him?" Amber asked. She purposely didn't ask, _will they find him?_ Because they would, one way or another, the question was, how would they find him? Dead in a ditch somewhere? Alive, but just barely, utterly broken, begging to be put down like a few patients she'd seen in her old E.R. rotations? Begging Amber to put his bullet in his brain because Lucas, whoever he was, had damaged him beyond repair? Could she even hold out hope that they – and who was they, actually? – would find him not that much worse for wear, a little shaken but at his core, undeniably still Wilson?

"I don't know," House replied. He was thinking the same thing. He was filled with regrets for every time he'd put Wilson through the ringer, every time Wilson had to solve House's problems, every prank he'd played to try and disrupt his friend's life. But through all of that, House had to believe that Wilson knew he cared, knew he trusted the oncologist like no one else. He wished he could say it, speak it aloud, but he couldn't get his tongue to work. He just wanted Wilson back, wanted things to go back to normal. He was sure he could promise to be better but, House thought to himself, people don't really change. Back to normal would be just that – back to normal.

"We'll figure this out, House," Amber said firmly. "We always do. _You_ always do."

"There are people on it," House countered. "Tritter and his… people, will figure it out."

"_We'll_ figure it out. It'll come to us. That asshole Lucas wants something. He'll tell us and then we'll outwit him. Use it against him." Amber's voice rose with each new word. She was gaining confidence. It was just a fucked up power-play. They could thwart him. They were smarter.

_Just because my heart feels like it's been tossed into a blender,_ Amber reasoned, _doesn't mean that I have to act as if my brain's been thrown in one. _

Reason over emotion. That was the way she had always been. It was close to impossible when she was so close to the situation, but… _Close to impossible and actually impossible are two different things. We'll make it through. And when it's over I'll wrap my arms around Wilson and box his ears for scaring me. And never, never let him go again. _

* * *

><p>Cuddy tried not to let it bother her. House and Amber were allowed to spend time together, it was reasonable for them to spend time together, considering the circumstances. They were, after all, the two people who Wilson had loved most.<p>

She bit her lip, caught herself referring to him in past tense and wanted to slap herself. No, she couldn't do that. Couldn't write him off like he was dead already. A different House might have recommended it, though – _if you act like he's dead then it'll be a pleasant surprise if he turns up alive._

She was lying across the bed, had been for the last forty-five minutes, trying in vain to convert her tossing and turning into actual sleeping. She felt like the Princess in that goddamned story, only being kept awake by another horrific crisis rather than a tiny pea. She considered counting sheep. She needed to rest, but who could sleep with this hanging overhead?

Wilson, who knew where Wilson was and what he was doing? Or, on a scarier note, what was maybe being done to him? Her stomach ached, tore, and she tried not to channel any visions of what could have happened, what could be happening while she lay there trying to sleep.

House kept floating in and out of her mind, sticking there, nagging there, a question she couldn't answer. Their relationship, new as it was, was awkward enough without horrible tragedies hitting them right off the bat. She didn't think it was the kind of thing that made a relationship stronger. It was like those tales of all the couples who couldn't stay together after losing a child. It was like that.

But that didn't mean that it was completely unreasonable for her to wish that House would just _talk_ to her. Instead, he kept going off with Amber. It wasn't as if Cuddy didn't understand what Wilson's disappearance meant. He was acting like Amber was the only other person to know the man!

As ridiculous as it was to feel jealous – jealous! – at a time like this, she couldn't deny that the feeling was there.

She also couldn't help but feel that House, and maybe Amber, knew more about the situation than they were telling. But what reason could they possibly have to shut her out? The only times House seemed to omit things were when he wanted to get away with something, or he wanted to hide an emotional reaction.

Or when he wanted to protect her.

But from what?

Weren't three heads better than two?

If all of them worked together, couldn't they save Wilson, bring him home, make him safe? Wasn't that what all of them wanted? Or had it become a secret club, the Save Wilson Club, and no one had invited her?

She could feel him slipping through her fingers. Curse Amber, curse things whole horrible situation!

She sat up in her bed and rubbed at her eyes.

She wouldn't sleep tonight.

* The Platters, "Only You". Single. 1955.


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Twenty: The Virus of Life**

**WARNING: Rape and violence in this chapter.  
><strong>

"_Just keep the violence down,_

_Not yet, don't make a sound…"_

Wilson's eyes were shut and behind them were painted, little by little, mirages and half-dreams, some memories, some wishful thinking.

He had tried not to sleep for a while now, had tried not to let Lucas get that advantage over him. But eventually he couldn't fight it anymore and he had fallen off a mental cliff due to pure and simple exhaustion.

The dream he had was an odd one. He was back in college – not even medical school, but college. He had just discovered that a classmate of his was jealous of him for some reason he didn't really understand. He was trying to diffuse the situation, trying to talk sense.

He had always been that kind of man. Usually, at least. He had lost his temper once or twice, when someone had pushed him to the limit. He'd fought that man in New Orleans, the night he met House. He had gotten furious with House when the other man didn't accept Amber.

But he liked to think he was a reasonable man, most of the time. Maybe he could talk sense to Lucas… but could someone really talk sense to an insane person?

As he dreamt, he thought of these things, almost background noise, background thoughts to the plot at hand.

He was speaking to the other young man, whose face he couldn't quite see, trying to convince him that there was nothing to be jealous of.

Instead of cooling down, the man grabbed Wilson's hand and yanked him.

Wilson thought of his brother, thought of Danny and how the one night he had hung up and then Danny had run away again and he hadn't seem him until so many years later.

The young man was holding Wilson on a ledge, on a window, and he had a… Wilson couldn't tell what it was exactly, maybe a bomb, but it looked like a blue… a bedframe, actually but Wilson knew, just knew, that it was dangerous.

"You'll kill somebody!" Wilson cried.

"That's the point."

* * *

><p>Wilson opened one eye, then the other. He wished for light but dreaded it at the same time, as the darkness was starting to get to him. He couldn't remember exactly what light felt like but when he pictured it, he connected it with Amber and her soft, blonde hair, the color of sun.<p>

Amber would come for him. House would come for him. Just as he would have come for them.

He would feel her soft, beautiful hair against him and she would take him away from all of this. He would never take her for granted again, he'd tell her every day how much he loved her, even though it would probably drive her nuts and get her to punch him or something. He'd do it anyway. He'd kiss the ground of his office…

He heard the deceptively gentle sound of footsteps from the far corner of the room.

Lucas' voice hovered, or maybe slithered like a snake.

"Wilson."

Simply his name.

He had never dreamed that his name alone could sound so full of darkness, of foreboding. It was like a death sentence. And this was the man – this was the man who'd replaced him as House's single "friend" for a while; Wilson could barely even remember what House had done that time to make him walk away; some dirty trick he'd pulled on Amber that seemed so insignificant now.

That couple of months Wilson had sworn to be done with him, to stop letting his life be run by that asshole Greg House.

And he'd let this man into his life.

What had he done?

He knew that Lucas must not have seemed that way at first. He was a shoulder to lean on when Wilson had pulled House's rug out from under him.

Maybe that meant, in a way, that he deserved this.

Wilson felt Lucas' hands on him, and the realization of what was about to happen coursed through him like an electrical current.

And so this time, this time he fought because maybe, maybe he deserved some punishment, some slap on the wrist for not understanding, not intervening but for God's sake he did not deserve _this_.

He fought as hard as he could; at least he could give Lucas a run for his money. The difficulty of fighting in handcuffs was obvious, however, and as Wilson tried to twist away, Lucas grabbed his arm and twisted it, hard.

Wilson heard it snap.

His brain shorted out; the pain overtook him but in a way it was a relief, a distraction from what was to come.

Because there was only one thing worse, one coup de grace that Lucas could put on him now. The last way to get back at House in his horrible, deranged mind. To take something from Wilson that House had done with Cuddy.

Wilson's head swam. It hurt. It ached.

And then, just like that, all of him ached. Every nerve ending, crying out, pleading for Lucas to not do this – but not Wilson's voice. He would not beg. He was past begging. He did not want mercy; he would do something better.

He would survive this.

He let his thoughts drift to Amber again as he felt sure that something had broken inside him, torn or maybe snapped – he knew the medical realities but he couldn't list them, not now, couldn't fly back in his head to doing clinic duty for people who had been in this situation and coaxing them that it wasn't their fault, of course, not their fault.

But they'd always assume that it was their fault. It was the psychology of the thing, Wilson figured. A twisted notion of accepting responsibility for something so awful. Just as people blamed themselves for their illnesses, for their loved ones dying, they'd accept blame for this – and why? Did that make it any easier, somehow?

Lucas would want him to blame House.

But he wouldn't. He wouldn't.

It'd be less hopeless, less deadening to fall into the old trap and blame himself.

House would come. Amber would come.

* Slipknot, "The Virus of Life". _Vol. 3: Subliminal Verses_. 2005.


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty: Just a Job to Do**

"_The harder you run,_

_Then the harder you'll fall,_

_I'm coming down hard on you…_

_I'm hoping that my aim is true!"_

"Detective Tritter. Detective Bennett." The two looked up at the voice and instantly, both knew that it wasn't good news. Then again, Tritter considered, when had it ever been good news when Alvarez had poked her head into his office?

The woman had hated him on sight, ever since she'd met him, and the feeling had been pretty mutual. Alvarez had chalked it up to an inability for Tritter to take orders from a woman and a belief in police work being an "old boys club", but Tritter chalked it up to Alvarez being a raging bitch who had it in for him.

Both theories may have had some degree of truth to them.

They were guided to Alvarez's office, though Tritter would have made the analogy to a dog being led along on some kind of choker chain.

They sat.

"It has come to my attention that you've been looking into Gregory House, off the books."

Tritter chewed on his lip a moment, trying to come up with the best way to explain it. It turned out that he didn't have to, as the next voice he heard was Miranda's.

"Lieutenant Alvarez." Miranda leaned forward and gave a winning smile. "Dr. House actually came to us for help." She proceeded to shoot Tritter a look that clearly read,_ Please do not say anything, or I will kill you_. "You see, a friend of his had gone missing… But there wasn't any proof that it was, well, any kind of foul play. He asked us to look into it, off the record."

Alvarez smiled back, but it was an icy smile, and she leaned forward as well, locking eyes with Miranda.

"And why, may I ask, would he come to someone who tried to put him away in prison?" she inquired.

Miranda opened her mouth a moment, then closed it again.

Tritter cut in, "House likes mysteries. He's interested in people even if he doesn't like them. He came to us because he knows that he and I… well, we have some stuff in common." Alvarez coughed.

"Hmm. I wonder what that could be?" she retorted.

Tritter couldn't stop himself from shooting her a glare. Wilson was out there getting tortured, and she was sitting here playing with the two of them like a cat playing with a ball of yarn! What the hell did Alvarez know, anyway? Nothing about real police work! She just liked to sit in her nice cushy office and give orders.

Tritter wished with all his might that he could tell her that.

"I'll make it clear to you, Detectives," Alvarez told them, "If I get a whiff of either of you looking into anything to do with Greg House again, you're off the force. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars."

"You can't do that," Tritter protested.

"Yes, I can. I have cases for the two of you to address." She handed them each a folder. "I expect that you will handle them with all the… enthusiasm you seem to have mustered up for your little trip down memory lane."

* * *

><p>Miranda swung her legs over the wooden edge of Tritter's bed.<p>

"So, what would the station say if they knew we were in bed together?" she commented dryly, grabbing a pillow and putting it on her lap.

He smirked and rolled his eyes. Tritter was off to the far edge of the bed, his legs hanging over the edge and lying on an ugly yellow-and-brown toadstool, while Miranda was next to him.

"So we're not actually going to listen to Alvarez, are we?" he replied, "We're not actually going to get off the case."

She put a hand on her chin and seemed to consider the pros and cons.

"So, worst case scenario, we never work in this or any other town again," she pointed out.

"Best case scenario," Tritter countered, "We save a man's life."

Miranda threaded her fingers together and sighed.

"So that decides it. I think we can both agree that a man's life is worth our jobs. But what if we cut Alvarez in on it? Told her why we couldn't tell her before and let her throw her weight around and see what she can find out? She's got connections everywhere, after all."

Tritter shook his head.

"We can't trust her to not make a scene; in fact, we can trust her to make a scene. The woman needs her face plastered on the news all the time – and if Douglas means what he said about getting the police involved, well, we don't want to be receiving pieces of Wilson in the mail." He shuddered. "We have to try and handle this on our own as best we can. With House's help, as much as I'm hesitant to say so."

"And Dr. Volakis," Miranda pointed out.

Tritter nodded.

"Okay, and Dr. Volakis. But," he started, then sighed, "We have to be in all the way. We can't half-ass this and then screw up the case and lose our careers, too – then everyone loses."

"Well, don't you know me by now, Detective?" Miranda retorted, leaning in to look him straight in the eye. "When have I ever been any less than all-in on anything?" She gave him a cocky smile and moved her hand to his knee. "I give one-hundred percent."

"Even if it costs us everything?"

She shrugged.

"If it's not worth risking everything for, then what's the point? There are," she paused and leaned in a little closer, so their faces were inches apart, "Things that are worth it?"

"Like?" Tritter prompted.

She pushed her lips against his in a fell swoop. He was too shocked to respond.

When she pulled away, she was still looking at him. She didn't blush or look embarrassed; instead, she shrugged it off and continued her thought.

"Like being a hero."

* "Just a Job to Do", Genesis, _Genesis,_ 1983.


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter Twenty-One: Closer**

"_Help me, I've broke apart my insides…_

_Help me, I've got no soul to sell…"_

House tried to figure out how many hours it had been since Wilson had been taken, but the numbers got fuzzy in his head, didn't compute and weren't even legible. It didn't matter whether they were minutes or hours or days; it all felt the same, the realization crawling over him like scorpions or centipedes, the knowledge that Wilson's chances of coming out of this were pretty slim.

But the statistical part, the idea that Wilson would likely die, wasn't what was really bothering him. He was a doctor. People died every day. Even Kutner had died. He himself had gotten damn close.

It was the uncertainty, the idea that there was something unknowable, unthinkable happening to Wilson.

_Pain._ Maybe that was the word that danced evilly across House's brain like Salome dancing for the head of John the Baptist. House had lived with pain for so much of his recent life, courted it like a wife that had been thrust upon him due to some sort of shotgun engagement. He had never wanted that drawn around Wilson, drawn around him like a noose. He'd always told Wilson that he didn't understand, and he never wanted him to.

The fellows could wonder and Tritter and his partner could try and help, but they wouldn't get it. House doubted even Amber could. Not really. But Amber was closest to understanding it, and that was why she was the woman sitting across from him right now. Not speaking, just sitting, drinking a coffee in House's apartment.

"What do you think?" House asked. Four little words that meant nothing and everything.

Amber reached out and placed her hand on top of House's. An unimaginable gesture before. Before this horrible thing brought them together. House hated it. He wanted to fling his hand away but it all seemed terribly juvenile. He could do juvenile; but only when Wilson had been there to watch it, to comment and shake his head and tell House that he was being ridiculous. Or the few times it had seemed as if Wilson had finally had enough and it seemed as if he would tell House to go fuck off and die already, to drown in his own self-destruction.

Like the times with Tritter.

How oddly things came together, bled together. Memories. Polaroids. Dreams.

He thought of how close he and Wilson had always been. All the quips about how they were or should be a couple. Maybe they should've been. Maybe that would have saved Wilson from Lucas' wrath; Lucas could have had Cuddy and… But no. That'd be wrong. Knowing Lucas' capacity for violence now, House couldn't do anything but cringe at the thought of he and Cuddy together.

The phone ringing cut into his thoughts. It was the bland tone that House's phone had defaulted to for "unknown caller".

House's breath caught in his throat. Maybe it was a hospital or the police, saying that Wilson had been dropped off safe and sound.

That was unlikely, so very unlikely, but part of his mind still clung to it before Amber gave him a look that demanded he pick the damn phone up already and answer it, see one way or another who it was. He scooped it up into his hand and pressed the "answer" button.

"House," he announced.

"Hello, House." It was Lucas' voice. Lucas' trademark snarl with all of the newly deep-seated evil in it.

"Where's Wilson?" House yelled into the receiver. He'd always watched those hostage movies and said sarcastic things like, "You think he's going to tell you?" But now, he couldn't think of much better or wittier or more intelligent to say. He just wanted to know that Wilson was still alive and breathing, even if he were damaged.

Because House was damaged anyway and Amber was damaged too but they could put Wilson back together, they could try. They could always try as long as Wilson was still alive.

"House," Amber hissed, "Is it…?"

House nodded ever so slightly, as if wary of Lucas picking up on any unnecessary movement and springing into action.

"Wilson is with me, House."

_Well,_ House told himself, _at least he said Wilson is, as opposed to… Wilson was, or whatever he'd say if Wilson… weren't, anymore. _

"What do you want, Lucas?" House continued. "Whatever you want… your problem is with me. It isn't with Wilson, so why don't you just let Wilson go and we can figure all of this out. Like men."

Lucas' laugh ricocheted through the phone line. It was like shrapnel. House's skin crawled.

"Why, how exciting, House! I was just about to explain the same thing. Listen to my instructions. If you don't listen to me… Wilson dies. And he dies screaming. Am I clear?"

"Crystal," House mumbled.

"Bring the girl, too. Wilson's little girlfriend."

"Don't involve her in this." House felt like he was trying to be one of those hard men, those tough men in those movies, again. It was all so cliché, all so scripted. So fake, but this was real. It was all real.

"She was in it the first second she heard your name, House." Lucas laughed. An evil laugh. "You're going to listen to me now, House."

House tried not to sigh, but Lucas obviously had a few screws loose; if he hadn't had Wilson in his possession, House would have told him, too.

Instead, he said, "I'm listening. What do you want me to do?"

"Walk out your door to the end of the road. Go up to Main Street. Take the number 415 bus to the fifth stop. Get off. I'll find you there."

"And then we get Wilson?"

But the line had already gone dead.

Nine Inch Nails, "Closer", _The Downward Spiral_.


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty-Two: My Back Pages**

"_Lies that life is black and white  
>Spoke from my skull. I dreamed<br>Romantic facts of musketeers  
>Foundationed deep, somehow<br>Ah, but I was so much older then  
>I'm younger than that now…"<em>

"House isn't picking up his phone." Foreman's fingers tapped against the desk as his brow creased in concern.

"How is this in any way out of the ordinary for House?" Taub replied in a bored voice. "Let's find something productive to do. House was probably on a bender or something equally fascinating."

Foreman ignored Taub. If he wasn't going to take this whole situation seriously, then there wasn't really anything that he could do to stop him. Then again, that was who Taub was – he had built a career out of fixing appearances, out of basically turning pictures so they hung the right way. Not like Foreman, who had spent his time digging deep, looking inside people's minds and finding himself horrified by what he found there.

Where was Wilson? And hell, where was House? The problem was that the neurologist had a pretty good idea that the answers to that question would be the same. _Fucking House._

Foreman pressed his hands together and bowed his head. What the hell could be happening to the two of them right now? It wasn't as if House was Foreman's favorite person in the world, that was for damn sure, but it had gotten to the point where he was almost like family. Like some immediate family member who you wished would shut the fuck up most of the time but who, underneath it all, you loved and would kill to protect.

Wait… had he just told himself that he loved House?

Foreman tapped his fingers. He was a neurologist. His brain was his organ, that part of him that he had freaked out, clammed up about the potential for losing when he had had that goddamned illness… what was it even called again? It had been years ago.

His brain was getting off-topic. Where the hell was House? Where would… whoever had taken Wilson – and someone had to have, Foreman just knew, somehow…

Whoever that was would have to lure House away. But where? Where could he lure him to?

Somewhere close. No point in making House drive hours and potentially get lost. This person needed quick pay-off in a cat and mouse game.

To find him, Foreman would have to think like a sick bastard.

Well, there were harder things to do.

* * *

><p>"We can't just sit around, Chase. You know that, right?"<p>

"Okay." Chase sighed and looked around. They were in the coma patients' room. A good a place as any to not be overheard, he figured. "You keep saying that. But I'm waiting to hear the great, game-changing Foreman plan, and I haven't heard it yet. Do we even know who we're looking for?"

"Think about it. Who would want to hurt House?"

"Tritter?" Chase offered, "The father of the patient with AIDS? Hell, most of the patients he's seen?"

"It's not Tritter," Foreman countered, but he didn't really know the basis behind the comment. Tritter was in charge of bringing in the case, wasn't he? But how cliché would that be, like something out of a police drama where every Sergeant is secretly corrupt. _Then again,_ he reminded himself, _that kind of stuff does happen more often than not. Otherwise there wouldn't have been Serpico._

"Okay… What makes you so sure?" Chase inquired. Masters picked up her head and watched the conversation, for once not adding anything, at least not yet.

"Sometimes, Chase… sometimes you've just got to go on instinct. Somehow, this isn't Tritter's game. I mean, think about it. His whole little battle with House was almost five years ago. Why would he wait now, and why would he go after Wilson, who doesn't even have anything to do with it? He's been a cop here for five years, he could have sabotaged House any number of ways. Screwed him over any number of ways that wouldn't get him arrested if he got caught. This is someone about something way more recent. Way more personal. And what's recent in House's life?"

Masters looked at them.

"Cuddy."

They exchanged looks.

"Shit! How did I not even think of it before?" Chase said. "Fuckin' Lucas. It's Lucas."

"And if we just figured it out, that probably means House already knows." Foreman pressed his fingers against his temple. "We have to go find Tritter. He can probably tail House faster than we can."

"Find him and say what?" Chase asked with a sigh, "That we need him to put out a warrant based on our collective powers of deductive reasoning?"

Foreman grabbed his coat.

"Well, we need to tell him something. And we have a five-minute drive to figure out what that something will be."

* * *

><p>"Hello. We need to speak with Detective Tritter." Foreman had his game face on. Every muscle was pulled taut. He had his "no-nonsense" gaze on, the one Thirteen had always teased him about – hell, to him, was she Thirteen? Or was she Remy? And what would he be doing if it was her being held captive? But by who, though? Wendy the nurse? Foreman's exes were, at least, a little less insane than Lucas seemed to have proven to be.<p>

The detective on duty was Hamilton again, and he looked at the two of them with a gaze that betrayed a certain level of tiredness with seeing the group.

"What about?"

"We have some information he needs. Right now," Foreman said, looking straight into Hamilton's eyes. "Someone is in danger. Probably two people, actually. So you need to let us see him right this moment. And tell him… tell him it's about House."

"Well, look at you and your demands," Hamilton protested, but with a sigh, he picked up his phone. "Tritter? Got some people here to see you. They say it's important." Hamilton raised an eyebrow. "And they say it's about Dr. House."

* Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages".


	23. Chapter 23

**Chapter Twenty-Three:**

**My Little Needle**

"_I'll come down to get you high  
>Or maybe sing you a lullaby<br>Sing you to sleep, a sleep you'll never wake from  
>Sing you to coma so to speak…"<em>

House opened one eye, then the other. He was in a room somewhere, but that was about the basis of his knowledge. It was a dark room. It smelled like chlorine. That was odd. Why was there chlorine in this room?

It made sense, in a way. It meant that a pool was near. But why was he near a pool?

He needed to stop having these days that he needed to backtrack. He needed to start having days that went in the logical order, that started in the morning and ended at night instead of going some other way. Every other day was way too complicated, way too much effort, hurting like his leg always did but in ways he hadn't gotten used to yet and… where was he again, and what was he – oh yes. Wilson

Wilson was missing and they had to find Wilson. Was Wilson here… Maybe he…

House heard a moan beside him. A female moan. Very close to him. Had he been… knocked over the head in the middle of sex or something? As amusing a thought as that was, no. He was with Cuddy and that hadn't been Cuddy's voice he had just heard, it had been…

He stretched an arm and quickly realized that it was immobilized somehow. He was chained to a wall and the close-by person, well, they must be chained, too, or else that wouldn't make any sense.

Except he saw a flash of movement and realized that person was free. Not chained, and identifiable. Amber.

Amber's face was wracked with nerves, but somehow her voice was calm when she spoke, spoke at last and set the scene.

"Where's Wilson? You drag us all the way here, I assume he's here. Where's Wilson? Come on, Lucas. Tell us."

Lucas. House remembered now. It all flooded back, now, the way they had followed him to this place… he couldn't remember how they got there but he knew this place was far away. Off the grid.

"I see you're both awake." House looked around, but the place was shrouded in shadow. All at once, the dimmest flicker of light appeared and out of that, out of that appeared a slice, a bit (maybe a slide under a microscope) of Lucas' face. "I didn't chain up Miss Volakis, because my beef is not with her. She will be free to go so long as she speaks of this with no one."

"Not a fucking chance," Amber hissed, before House could cut her off and warn her – well, he would have known it wouldn't do any good, anyway. "The only way I'm leaving is with Wilson."

Lucas tilted back his head and laughed.

"I'm sorry, Miss Volakis."

"That's Dr. Volakis," Amber hissed.

Lucas ignored her and stepped over towards House.

"Recovering from that nasty bump on the head, are you, House?"

House tried to rub his head to figure out exactly what Lucas meant, but was reminded again of the binds. He must have a concussion. This wasn't good, of course. Then again… nothing about this was good. Lucas stepped forward again, until he was close enough to House that House could feel his breath against his face.

"You thought you could win, House. You thought that just because you were so smart, that you could take anything. Even things that didn't belong to you. Even things that belonged to somebody else. Like somebody who was your friend."

House's lip curled into a smirk.

"Last I checked, Lucas, Cuddy wasn't a thing. _My_ thing spends a lot of time with her, though, so maybe that was why you got confused. Honest mistake."

Lucas reeled back and kicked House hard in his bad leg. House slumped. He couldn't even scream, just went limp against the wall.

This was for real. Even with all of the horrible things that had happened so far, the things that he knew had happened to Wilson, there had been some ray of hope, even if it was as small as the head of a pin, that somehow it was all a nightmare he would wake up from, a Vicodin daze that rehab could somehow cure, that could be undone.

But now, it was all real. So painfully real that he couldn't cope, couldn't handle it but couldn't get away, either. No hope. There was no hope at all. Wilson would die and so would he, so would they.

"You want to know what I did to your Wilson?"

Amber cranked her head around, as if to say that Wilson's wasn't House's but hers.

"I chained him down and fucked him so hard… You might be fucking my ex, but I'm fucking him. He cried and bled and I broke his…"

Amber ran at him. Sense was out the window and blinding fury, simply, the order of the second. This man had hurt Wilson, the man she loved, had hurt him badly and she was going to fucking kill him if it was the last thing she ever did.

Lucas was faster than she ever thought he would be. She hadn't even seen the knife; she'd been too frazzled and upset to see the knife. But there it was, in his hand, and she couldn't stop, couldn't put on the brakes (or maybe didn't want to) before he had pulled back and stabbed it into her stomach. She held herself up a moment, just a moment, before her feet fell out from under her and she slumped to the ground.

House was yelling something but she couldn't hear it. She would have said everything faded to black but it wasn't black. Somehow… it was blue.

*Alkaline Trio, "My Little Needle"


	24. Chapter 24

**Chapter Twenty-Four: Anyway**

"_Anyway, they say she comes on a pale horse,_

_But I'm sure I hear a train…_

_Oh boy, I don't even feel no pain…"_

When House opened his eyes, he didn't immediately remember where he was. Part of him wondered if he was at work. Maybe he had done another crazy medical experiment and had knocked himself out cold. However, as his eyes scanned from one side of the room to the other, he realized that this was not only not the hospital, but nowhere that he wanted to be.

"Oh good… You're awake." He heard Lucas' voice in his ear. He couldn't tell where the other man was, exactly, only that he was uncomfortable close and that he wanted to move away, but he couldn't. Why couldn't he move away?

He tried to move his arms and legs but quickly found them bound to something. To the wall. His eyes scanned again; he could move his head but nothing else.

Amber was tied up similarly at the caddy-corner of where the two walls met, and she was slowly stirring. House wanted to tell her she probably wanted to stay asleep instead.

And what of Wilson? Where was he in all this? House tried to catch a hint of his voice or to catch a glimpse of his figure, but he came up short. Had he seen Wilson when he had arrived here, or had Lucas killed him already? House's stomach fell hard when he considered that possibility. Maybe he was going to present House with a gift-wrapped dead Wilson and then just smile and laugh as House realized that nothing was going to be all right for him ever again.

His thoughts were broken by the faintest sound of a soft groan. Had it really come from Wilson, or was House hallucinating? Differential diagnosis, he thought to himself. Maybe he'd just completely lost it, which of course would mean that Lucas had won. Like this had all been a game, that someone could win.

"All awake except for the pretty blonde," Lucas declared in a sing-songy voice that made House just want to thrash him within an inch of his life. This was all because House stole his girlfriend? That was what this was about? It was really hitting him for the first time in this whole ordeal, that this was about something that seemed so petty to House. Something that… something he might have given up if he had known… or would he?

"Listen, Lucas," House began. He had to shove all the sarcastic comments to the back of his mind and figure out a way to talk himself out of this. Maybe he could at least talk Wilson and Amber out of this, even as Amber hung limply in her binds. Maybe she was hurt, House thought with a frantic fear, maybe whatever Lucas had done to her had been permanent and she was dead, and they were trapped in this insane game forever.

"I don't want to hear from you, House! I stopped listening a long time ago. You shouldn't have fucked with me." The words should have been shouted, they should have been screamed but the tone of voice they were actually in was far more terrifying; it was this kind of low, drummed fury that bounced off the walls. Like he'd already given in to whatever was the worst in him, and now he was just allowing it to ooze out over all of them, coating the room in red.

House swallowed. He needed water, or at least needed the semblance that he'd be getting water sometime soon. He needed to get out of here he needed…

For the first time in his life, there were so many things he needed so much more than Vicodin.

* * *

><p>"GPS tracked them here," Tritter said as he put a hand on his hip and looked out at the warehouse in front of them.<p>

"What are the chances that they're actually alive?" Miranda inquired. "Should we call for back-up? We don't even have a warrant. What's our plan here?"

"Probable cause," Tritter replied. "We know House is there. We have a pretty good idea that he was snatched by Lucas…"

"But how much of that can we actually prove?" Miranda pointed out. "They're going to go over this with a fine-tooth comb, Trit. We could both lose our badges over this."

"Then so be it." He wasn't looking at her as he spoke. "My career can go down the tubes for this. I'd rather save a man's life…"

"If it even can be saved. What if we go down there and he's already dead, Trit? What then?"

Tritter didn't answer. He looked at the warehouse and then turned back to the three doctors behind him.

"If you want to get out, now's your chance."

* * *

><p>House's eyes widened when Lucas pulled out the needle. It was a sight that he had gotten so used to in his life these days; he saw people being given shots every single day. But now, in this context, it filled him with a terror that he knew, somehow, would be present every time he saw another needle for the rest of his life.<p>

And somehow he just knew that needle was intended for him.

"You're the expert, House," Lucas declared, "But I did some research. What's in this syringe is known as a paralytic. I'm sure you know what that means. It will make you unable to move at all… But you will feel everything. And you'll hear every word I'm saying to you." He was right up against House, now, and he jabbed the syringe against House's arm before he could make any case, before he could protest.

It began to work fast. House could feel it travelling. He was helpless against whatever Lucas wanted to do to him.

Maybe it was better this way. At least this would finally end it.

It wasn't going to be easy, though. He knew Lucas would make sure of that. He just didn't know the details but somehow, as he saw him picking up a blade, that didn't matter.

Lucas lifted the blade, put it right up against his good leg, and pushed. House wished that he could scream.

"LUCAS DOUGLAS! PRINCETON POLICE DEPARTMENT! PUT YOUR HANDS UP!"

House would have turned his head if he could, would have kept screaming if he could because the pain was still there but somehow not increasing.

He could tell that Tritter was somewhere, that he was… doing something, that he was yelling something. He couldn't tell much else. Everything was blurry and seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.

"LUCAS DOUGLAS! We won't tell you again!" There was a female voice this time.

"Quick, get Chase, Foreman and the girl in here," House heard Tritter say, "They're going to need medical attention, and quick. Get them in here Miranda! I'll take it from here."

* Genesis, "Anyway"


	25. Chapter 25

**Chapter Twenty-Five: No One's There**

"_You and me, we have no faces, _

_soon our lives will be erased,_

_Do you think they will remember, _

_Or will we just be replaced?"_

The hospital was buzzing with activity when Chase, Masters and Foreman entered and set to work on the patients that they'd help rescue, but had maybe been too late. This wasn't just a case, not a bunch of text on a chart or an interesting backstory. This was Amber, and House, and Wilson.

_God, Wilson,_ Chase thought to himself as he wheeled the unconscious man, in a stretcher, into the ER. He would have to get ready, and fast – looking at Wilson, it was obvious that surgery was going to be necessary, and the quicker the better.

He tried to take stock of everything that was going on around him. Wilson was the most critically injured, but House and Amber would need treatment, too. What the hell had that house of horrors been? More than that, how had a man he'd seen around, a man he must have talked to once or twice at least, gone so wrong?

Chase wasn't sure he believed in pure good or pure evil, not since he had left the seminary, but if there really was pure evil it would have to look something like that basement. What had gone so wrong in Lucas' head, and was it something that could have happened to any of them?

But now was no time to get bogged down in philosophy; now was the time to prove that all his life, all his training had purpose. He would save Wilson's life and he would worry about all the rest later. There was indeed a lot of "all the rest"… if Wilson survived, that was.

Chase didn't know if the hospital, if House and Cuddy, would be able to sustain it if Wilson didn't make it.

He slowly slipped off Wilson's clothes, trying not to let it feel like as much of a violation as that first assault must have been. He had done this more than once; it wasn't as if treating rape victims was unknown to him, but this was a man he knew. A man he was supposed to be an equal with – wait, not even that. He was supposed to be below Wilson, really, if he thought about it – he was still just a House underling even with all the training, and somehow in this moment, he was okay with that. Because it had taught him something about how to try, desperately, to handle this without losing his mind and falling apart.

Chase steadied his hands. He would do this right.

He didn't have any other choice.

* * *

><p>"We're going to be able to release you."<p>

The words floated into House's ears as he slowly looked around the room. Had he been sitting there for long? Had he been thinking, sitting, moving or had he just woken up out of nowhere? He wasn't entirely sure and for that reason, this lady doctor – who he didn't even really know, just some boring doctor at the hospital with brown hair and a slim chin – probably shouldn't have been making any sort of noise about releasing him, but he wasn't going to correct her because he wanted to go the hell home.

He sleepwalked through signing a bunch of papers and ignoring the instructions to use a wheelchair to get out to his car, which wasn't even in the parking lot of course (but he hadn't told them that) and at the least have someone come get him. Before he could leave, he had to figure out how Wilson was, how Amber was, whether Lucas had gotten away and was going to come back and finish this thing once and for all when House wasn't ready for him.

Had he ever been ready for him?

He didn't have to wait that long to find out about Amber. She was beside him seemingly in a flash, appearing from nowhere and slowly trying to rise from her own wheelchair. House thought to himself that she seemed to have recovered pretty quickly from a stab wound to the stomach – the Cutthroat Bitch must have been even more resilient than House had previously suspected.

"Hey." Amber spoke first, and House looked over at her, raising a hand with what felt like monumental effort.

"Hey," he replied.

"Going home?" she asked needlessly, and House gave a disinterested nod.

"They want me to call a cab or something," he mused, and she shrugged.

"We could just take the bus. One runs by here."

"How would you know?" House had tried for some kind of spite in there, just so he could be angry at someone or something while Wilson's life hung in the balance, and even past his life, his mind and his soul and his… ever being normal again, ever being able to get back to the comfortable stride he had once had. Amber shrugged.

"My car broke down a couple of times while I was battling for a place in your elite team," she replied dryly. "Figured I couldn't exactly call out on you, could I?"

"Maybe we should stay here," House said suddenly. "I mean, Wilson might…"

"Wilson is going to be in surgery for the next few hours," Amber corrected him. "And after he won't be up to seeing anybody for a while. I hear Chase is doing his surgery. You trained him, didn't you? So trust that you trained him well enough and go ahead and leave Wilson in his hands."

"Not sure that I'm comfortable with that."

"Nobody asked what you're comfortable with," Amber retorted, slowly rising from her wheelchair and taking House's hand in hers. "Let's go home."

"Saving my life again?" House asked sarcastically. She shrugged.

"Who even knows anymore?"

* * *

><p>Foreman sat by Wilson's hospital bed as he slept, dosed up with enough painkillers to knock out a horse. He didn't know what would happen when he woke up, but he knew that he should see someone he knew when he opened his eyes.<p>

He opened up a magazine, flipping through it but not really reading it, and waited.

* KoRn, "No One's There"


	26. Chapter 26

**Chapter Twenty-Six: I Was Falling In Love**

"_I'm sure there was moonlight but I don't remember__  
><em>_I was falling in love__  
><em>_I can't recall was it May or September__  
><em>_I was falling in love"_

They were going to be going home, finally. It felt as if House had imagined this moment, or maybe he had imagined everything that had come before it. Perhaps it was all the most vivid nightmare that he still hadn't quite awakened from, that he was still lying in a cold sweat after.

He was on a bus, and he wasn't quite sure how he had managed to get there. Beneath him was a hard plastic seat, covered with a half-assed excuse for a cushion. House shifted on it, trying to figure out if it was going to fall away beneath him and leave him back in Lucas' dungeon somehow. It wasn't as if he hadn't hallucinated before, whole scenes and whole answers and whole reasons. He'd hallucinated the beginning of his relationship.

House turned his head to the side and found himself looking, uncomfortably closely, at Amber. Her eyes seemed to be off somewhere else, like she was lost in thought. She was probably wondering, House figured, about Wilson and what his life was going to be like now. Maybe if the two of them could stay together through this.

House didn't know. After all, he had chased away Stacy after his own trauma, even though it was such a different kind that what Wilson had gone through. Wilson had never seemed the bitter type, though – House knew he had darkness in his past, like his brother's illness, and he didn't seem close to his parents, either.

At that, he found himself wondering if Wilson's parents would come up to see him. In all of the frenzy, he hadn't actually called them about this. Should he have? He wondered if this was what everyone meant when they reminded him he seemed to not know, or maybe knew but didn't care, about social cues and what they meant. When your best friend gets kidnapped, what exactly are the social cues? What are the rules? Is there a protocol?

House shook his head without realizing that he was doing it, and Amber looked at him with curiosity.

She opened her mouth and said to him, "So is it true?"

House stared back at her.

"What? Is what true?"

"Is it true that when Wilson said he was dating me, you said that he might as well have been dating you?"

House moved his cane back and forth from hand to hand, pausing only to stare at her some more.

"What kind of talk are we leading into right here, Amber?" he inquired. "Because I have a girlfriend. A woman friend. A Cuddy friend, and I'm not trying to come out of the closet or anything…"

Amber laughed.

"Now, I wouldn't be surprised," she teased. It was weird to hear that sound, the normal-Amber voice instead of that pursed, closed-lipped tone she'd been talking with ever since Wilson had vanished. It was now, too, that House noticed the color going back into her cheeks and into the rest of her face. When had she gotten so pale? House didn't know. He wondered vaguely whether his own features had changed the same way. Maybe Cuddy had noticed, or had she brushed them off?

He was struck by another odd thought at that – had Amber noticed the changes? What exactly was she getting at in this current conversation? She had always had a goal in mind in all the time he had known her; what was it this time around?

House rolled his eyes. He couldn't let Amber get to him. Not now, when it seemed as if just about everything would get to him. Every word, every noise, even the steady hum of the bus seemed to be willing him to fall into a full-blown panic attack, to fall off the seat, curl up into a ball and just scream until his throat bled, like that wasn't a weird reaction at all but a perfectly normal one.

"Listen, House…" Amber started. "We've been through a lot with this, and… Well, I'm feeling a bit like a whackadoodle… So try not to take this the wrong way."

House raised an eyebrow.

"Okay… Continue."

"But did you ever… think about me?"

House smirked.

"You mean, aside from what a Cut-Throat Bitch you were?"

"Were?" Amber said with a chuckle. "Don't you mean 'are'?"

House shrugged.

"I think we can both agree that Lucas was a lot more cut-throat."

"Not like he had a reason to be," Amber said, looking away. "He lost. Fair and square. That's all there was to it. He wasn't devoted, he was a crazy stalker."

"So that's what you call yourself? Devoted? Instead of cut-throat?"

Amber shrugged.

"I like to win," she replied. "But I love Wilson. I care about him more than you'd ever know. But…"

"But what?"

Amber looked out the window. There seemed to be a lot of things she wanted to say, but none of which seemed to come to the forefront. Other than what he'd figured out by hazarding a guess, House realized he didn't even know very much about Amber Volakis at all.

"I care about you too."

House cocked his head to the side.

"You're screwing with me, Amber. Listen – I don't think either of us need this right now. Things are… well, complicated, and we're both coming down off a lot of painkillers. Why don't we revisit this… whatever you're trying to say, when we're both not under the influence… Or…"

But Amber was already cutting him off by cupping his face in her hands, leaning in and pressing their lips together. House was vaguely aware that the bus driver seemed to be watching this from the bus' mirror, and he wasn't sure whether he wanted to break the kiss to tell him to mind his own business or to tell Amber that this was all a mistake.

He wasn't sure if he wanted to break the kiss at all, in fact.

And so he didn't.

* Erin Gallagher, "I Was Falling In Love"


	27. Chapter 27

**Chapter Twenty-Seven: Heartache Tonight**

"_Somebody's gonna hurt someone__  
><em>_before the night is through__  
><em>_Somebody's gonna come undone.__  
><em>_There's nothin' we can do…"_

"We should tell Wilson what happened." Amber looked up from the spot she had been occupying on House's couch silently for the last ten minutes.

"Are we on the same planet here, Amber?" House asked. "That's not what Wilson needs right now, or ever. I was going to go for the whole deny-it-ever-happened plan, if that's all right with you that is."

"He has a right to know, House."

"Has a right to know what? That in a moment of pure stupidity, hormones took over and we lip-locked? It's no big deal. Let's just move past it. Would you be amenable to that?"

Amber stood up and glared at him.

"No, actually, I wouldn't," she replied. "Wilson doesn't need to be lied to. Do you know what that would do to him? To find out later? To find out from someone else?"

"Who else would know? One of the people on the bus? Do you think they'd just walk up to him and slap a cameraphone in his face and tell him what we've been up to? No one is that interested in what strangers get up to."

"First of all," Amber said, "You are. Secondly, we need to give him the chance to react to this however he's going to. We can't keep it from him just because this might not go the way we want it to."

House stared at her, tilting his head to the side.

"This was all a mistake. Can't we just drown it in Vicodin and… whatever you take… diet pills or whatnot?"

Amber grabbed House's hand.

"We're doing this. No if, ands or buts about it."

"This is all going to fall apart, Amber. But I'll take the moment to say that I told you so… because, after all, I did tell you so."

Amber rolled her eyes.

"How is it that we can go from nearly getting killed together to fighting like two school-yard kids? I keep expecting you to go, 'I know you are, but what am I?'"

House shrugged.

"I know that what we did is not something we should tell Wilson about. But… whatever. It's your funeral, Cut-Throat Bitch. Thanks for inviting me along."

* * *

><p>Amber dragged her hand over her face as they sat on the bench outside of Wilson's hospital room. The idea had seemed a lot more legitimate and a lot more honest and forthright when she had been explaining it to House. Now that she was alone with it for a few moments, it seemed like a really stupid idea.<p>

"Dr. Volakis? Dr. House?" a nurse came out and looked between them. It was like she knew, or at least she suspected. Or maybe Amber was just hypersensitive after everything that had happened. It felt like the painkillers were still swimming in her brain, that everything was that touch hazier than it normally was, that she wasn't standing with her feet as far on the ground as they ought to have been.

"Thank you," Amber mumbled. She was sure she knew the nurse's name, actually – they'd met a few times back in the "reality show" craziness when she had battled to be on House's team – but she couldn't place it.

She had usually been so together. So… well, not always. She'd been together in her career, she could say that much. But in her personal life? She was used to it being a mess.

The diet pills she'd taken to be thin enough, the hair products that burnt her scalp to try and be good enough, like relationships had been something that she could study for. Fill in the oval and make sure to leave no stray marks. But that's what they had always been, nothing but stray marks.

She was swaying on her feet. How long had it been since she had slept? Since this whole nightmare had begun? She wished she could close her eyes and put everything back as it should be. Make Wilson whole again.

She stepped inside the hospital room as House followed her. Wilson was lying on the bed, with bandages covering more of him than not. He was awake, but there was a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes that made Amber suspect that he was drugged to the gills. Maybe it was for the best, maybe he wouldn't even remember this confession.

"Wilson?" It had never seemed weird to her before that she called him by his last name, like House did. Sometimes she must have called him James but it was like switching shoes on and off, something you didn't really think about until you looked down and realized you had somehow walked into a professional meeting in sneakers and everyone, yes everyone, was looking at you.

He opened his eyes lazily, staring up at her. He didn't give much of an indication that he heard her. Maybe it was an involuntary response to stimulus, the doctor in her suggested wryly.

"Wilson, I wanted to talk to you because I did something and I think you need to know about it. I don't totally know where it came from, but it probably had to do with everything that was going on, and everything that happened, and… and, well… I kissed House." She didn't let him get a word in, just kept going, making it up as she went along, like she was pedaling and didn't know where she was going. Just… away, away from any result in which she'd have to be apart from Wilson all over again. "I think we should be together. The three of us. I think that's what we ought to do."

House, who had been surprisingly quiet through all of this, turned to her and stared. He opened his mouth, but she glared at him and then smiled manically.

"That's the answer. So none of us will be alone again. Not ever again."

The Eagles, "Heartache Tonight"


	28. Chapter 28

**Chapter Twenty-Eight: 3**

"_Merrier the more,__  
><em>_Triple fun that way__  
><em>_Twisted on the floor__  
><em>_What do you say?"_

House watched as Amber fiddled with her hands over the steering wheel, as if she didn't really know what to do with them or if there was a right place to put them.

"I almost wish he wasn't coming home, you know," Amber told him, "Because now I feel like I have to say things, and I need to make sense, and this all needs to… I don't know, fit somehow, and I don't think it's supposed to fit and…"

"Shh. I'm tired of listening to you," House grumbled, "Once Wilson is back, things can get back to normal."

"So that's your plan, after all of this? Denial? You do seem to be pretty good at it…"

"Denial is what keeps people alive, Cut-Throat," House told her. "If people didn't deny things, they would have to face them, and eventually it would cut them down and they would…"

"But you're the one always insisting on people facing up to the hard truth. How about all those adopted kids you proved were adopted? Or, well, Wilson told me about your drama with your father. Would it have been better to just pretend you were his kid, even though in your heart you knew what the truth was? Would your childhood have fared any better or would you still be as miserable as you turned out?"

"I don't know," House admitted, "Because that wasn't ever me. But I don't think Wilson is as set on confronting the truth as I am."

"There's only one way to find out." Amber turned away and pulled into the hospital parking lot.

* * *

><p>About ten minutes later, a nurse was wheeling Wilson out to the car. He seemed to be in okay spirits, at least in the fact that he was politely responding to the nurse's obvious attempts to hit on him. Maybe it was a good sign, House figured, maybe they didn't see him as damaged goods and that would help.<p>

House had experience in being damaged goods, and none of it was positive. Unless you were trying to date Cameron, that was.

"Wilson," House said in a low voice. "I see you're… here."

"House," Wilson spoke up, looking back and forth between Amber and House. "I see you're both here too. Let's just go home." He blinked at them. "You're both staring at me awkwardly. This is making me uncomfortable."

Amber blushed.

"We'll be home in just a moment. Then it'll be your turn to stare at us awkwardly. We can have a face-off."

* * *

><p>Wilson was lying on his bed when Amber blurted it out.<p>

"So, what would fix all of this would be if we had a threesome."

He sat up, wincing at the aches that his painkillers weren't quite masking, and stared at her.

"I… What? I must have misheard you, or these are doing something really weird to my hearing."

"No, Wilson," Amber continued, moving to straddle him gently. "You heard me exactly right. But are you up for it? It's okay if you aren't. I really think it would help, though."

"There isn't any problem, especially not one eager to be fixed by polygamy."

"Oh, come on Wilson," House spoke up, "Isn't every problem able to be fixed by sex? It's not like you're afraid of it."

"Where did you get that I was implying I'm afraid of sex?" Wilson's voice got a little high-pitched. "But you do have to take into account that I just got out of the hospital and… everything that happened and…"

Amber cut him off as she pressed her lips to his, sitting next to him and draping her arms around him.

"We love you."

"This isn't going to fix what happened, you know," Wilson spoke up as House hobbled to his side.

"I know that," House replied, "There's no heal-all. If there was, I would have taken it."

Wilson surprised himself by not flinching away from the face so close to his. There was a strange warmth there, and he turned and pressed a nervous, reluctant kiss to House's cheek.

"Liar," he fired back, "You just like being messed up."

"Maybe. But I wouldn't want to be messed up with anyone but you," House told him. "It's good to have you back."

"What have you done with House? I could accept you breathing down my neck, but not you actually talking about your feelings. Do I seem that damaged that you've got to go all Lifetime Special Event on me?"

House rolled his eyes.

"You just can't accept anyone being nice to you. You hate thinking that you're damaged. You would rather everyone else be damaged. You're used to being the normal one…"

"House?" Amber cut in, "Shut up."

She leaned in and pressed a kiss to Wilson's temple.

"It's worth a try, isn't it?" she asked in a silky sort of voice. "What's the harm? We can always stop."

"Can we?" Wilson asked, "This seems like opening a door that I don't know we'd be able to close again."

"You're just dramatically saying that things will be awkward. Wilson, it's me… in case you're late to the game, between you and I, things have always been awkward. I've always been looking at you a little longer than I should… Maybe I should have passed you a note or something saying to check off 'yes', 'no', or 'maybe so.'"

Amber looked at House. She seemed about to comment, but then thought the better of it.

"We don't have to do this if you don't want to," she said, to Wilson, instead. "Things might not exactly go back to normal, but they will go back."

Wilson started to shake his head, but then he looked down.

"You promise we'll stop if things get too weird? Stop and then never, never talk about this ever again? I mean it, House. I'm not walking into my office to see, like, a sex tape of tonight or something crazy like that."

House put up his hand.

"Scout's Honor, Wilson."

"…For some reason, I believe you. I don't know why."

"Because I'd kill him if he goes back on this," Amber cut in, "And you know I would."

Wilson sighed.

"How do we start this? It seems… Complicated."

Amber leaned in and pressed a kiss to his lips.

"For one, we talk so much less," she whispered. "Let's get started."

Britney Spears, "3". The Singles Collection


End file.
